So, I played hooky from work yesterday due to some previous personal/professional/educational/awesome-al engagements. So I took advantage of the day off to drag the sorry load of crap that I call my butt up to the LHBS (Local Home Brew Store in the parlance of our times). It's been a while since I brewed up something and I am thinking the time is probably right. It had also been a real long time since I got out to the place...definitely not since the craziness of this year's hop shortage that everyone is all freaky outy about.
Walked in to find the place incredibly well stocked...eerily so even. It was dead silent (sometimes there is at least some music playing) and the guy behind the counter wasn't on the compy or reading or drinking or doing the crossword...nothing. He was just sitting there looking around when I walked in which I think we can all agree is completely disturbing and weird.
Anyhoo, I was happy to see that the place had a good supply of hops from a volume perspective...I mean at least I would have some plant matter to dunk into my boiling wort. The varieties they did have in volume were kinda random ones that I hadn't seen before though like Glacier, Cluster, Vanguard, and Spalt. I grabbed some Vanguard, which had a nice mild floral aroma, and some Glacier, which had a stronger more citrusy/grapefruit thing going on. I'll use the Glaciers to bitter and the Vanguards for aroma...should be pretty tight methinks.
I was disappointed to see that the MOAGM (Mother Of All Grain Mills) is no longer on site at this place. That thing was the balls. You could throw a good 7 pounds of grain into it at once and it would have it all milled lickity split. So instead, I had to switch to the pitiful by comparison, and extremely unreliable, smaller mill. I was lucky though and my 11 pounds of grain milled perfectly, albeit slowly. Here's the recipe as it stands right now, I'll be tweaking it a bit when I get home and run the numbers on AmateurMash (which I have yet to do as this was a sort of spur-of-the moment recipe):
#7.5 British Two Row
#2 Munich Malt
#.5 Crystal 60
#.5 Crystal 90
#.25-.5 Chocolate Malt (this is the most variable part of my recipe at this point)
1.5 oz Glacier (6.3% aa) 60 mins
1 oz Vanguard (4.8% aa) 10 mins
Pitching this mama on a washed cake of Beast from my last pale ale
Hopefully it comes out well. I don't have a name for it yet, so that should consume most of my waking hours until I brew the crap out of it on Sunday. In the meantime be good, boys.
&Ry
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1 comment:
That picture of the brewstore clerk is uncannilly close to the real thing. Also, I can tell it's been over a year since you've been in there because the big grain mill went bye bye loooong ago. The small mill is a pain in the ass, but you get a much better crush
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