The road less traveled...

...is not the road I have been on. It's late and I want to catch up on a few things, but first let me put in a plug for something that helped me as we drove back and forth to the coast for David's game this weekend: The Brewing Network and its podcasts. I highly recommend The Brewing Network both as entertainment and as a way of learning more about both the depth and variety of the craft of homebrewing and about the similarities among what appear to be vastly different brews.

One segment in particular I really liked was the one on Vienna-style lagers. This style is the one for which Dos Equis Amber and Negra Modelo are examples (at extreme ends of the scale). I got to wondering whether I could take the grain bill for a darker Viennese lager and ferment it with an ale yeast and get a Negra Modelo type ale that acts like a lager, much in the way that Biermuncher's Cream of Three Crops acts like a lager while really being a cream ale. I predict an experiment soon.

RIP 090601 Coldwater 420

After having been gone for two weeks, I got home from work today knowing my Geordie Boy was probably ready to keg and that I wasn't in the mood for any of the Honey-Brew List and its spice tones. I went to the trusty right-hand cobra tap where the Coldwater 420 has been patiently waiting for attention, and the first pint I drew was really exquisite. It had all the flavor that the beer had offered when it was originally tapped, but the hoppiness had mellowed to a very drinkable point. I looked eagerly to the next pint, but lo and behold halfway through drawing it - PFFT!SPLAT!PSST! - the !^%!@%^@$^! thing floated on me! Just my luck.

I will definitely brew this recipe again, but I think I'm going to run the local variant of Cream of Three Crops first, to make something more, shall we say, accessible for guests.

Kegged: 090801 Geordie Boy Ale

Did I really only brew once in August? Wow.

Anyway, I kegged it. It finished around 1.014 for an ABV of 3.9%, which is under the style guideline probably because the OG was a little low. We'll see how it tastes tomorrow.