I bottled the beer this morning, after allowing it to sit in secondary fermentation for one week. I would have left it in there a little longer if I hadn't opted to dry hop it, but I really didn't want the hop bag to soak in it for more than a week. The FG was 1.008, but I didn't get the actual OG on the brew day. If it was close to the estimated 1.092, then it has an ABV approaching 11%.
I managed to save about two thirds of a bottle for the final gravity reading and was just starting to enjoy the glass of uncarbonated beer this morning, when I knocked the glass over during clean-up. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to consume a little more, but I was relieved that I didn't break the glass or cause irreparable damage to a wireless router sitting nearby.
It definitely has a high ABV, even if it isn't actually in double digits, but it is masked by the residual sweetness of the black cherry juice and the overall fruitiness of the Duvel yeast. I'm hoping it finished a bit dry, once it is fully bottle conditioned, but I'm generally pleased with the results.

Well hot damn. Sounds good!

After a year of this I have a dedicated IVAR (or whatever the cheap Ikea one is - GORM?!?) full of stuff and have made 70 gallons of beer, five of mead, a couple of cider. Thanks for the training wheels.

Fuck yeah.

I think I'm brewing this weekend with the girl while Mommy is out of town at a friend's NYC bachelorette weekend. Def bottling.

I plan on brewing my hoppy double wit for Great Nebraska Beer Fest on Sunday Morning. I'm going to add some Key Lime extract to it before bottling, and need some serious secondary fermentation before I even think of doing that.

Just a heads up, but the BJCP style guidelines are going to drastically change this year. They are updating them from the 2008 edition and allegedly simplifying them quite a bit. I know that none of you currently enter contests, but if you are looking to start brewing to style, they will be quite a bit different from the guidelines I have grown accustomed to at beer contests.

Interesting, I wonder why? I guess brews are changing a lot.

They do it all the time. A lot of it has to do with trends in brewing, and what becomes acceptable for certain styles. There also new styles that tend to dominate the experimental categories and categories with a dwindling number of entries, so they like to modify the categories every couple of years to make judging more efficient.
The only major changes that I have heard of will impact brewers who tend to make a lot of Porters and Amber ales. They might also be adding a category for non traditional IPA's, i.e. Black, White, Red, etc.
It also allows the AHA to produce better trained judges, since everyone who will be taking exams in the near future will have to learn this study guide, and not the outdated 2008 guidelines.

I got ingredients for two batches yesterday, a saison and an IPA. Going to bottle one batch and brew two more this weekend. VERY excited, my pipeline is fucking dry.

I'm brewing a double wit with an estimated ABV of 8.45% for Great Nebraska Beer Festival this morning.
It has nearly 40 IBU's, so it will be approaching White IPA levels of hopiness, but I didn't want it to be too cloying and wanted to use plenty of citrusy/fruity hops.

I am contemplating the simplest sour from the 'Brewing Classic Styles' book - all the subsequent ones require a good year of aging, which seems like a long wait.

You can use a sour mash technique to make a Flanders Red in a relatively short amount of time, and Berliner Weisse doesn't normally take that long either.
Lambic takes a considerable amount of time, and I don't think you can shortcut the process with a sour mash.
I haven't attempted a sour, since I would most likely accidentally infect all my brewing equipment with sour bugs, since I don't have the space to keep them in separate rooms.

The next beer I am making is for my first foray into a BJCP sanctioned beer contest. My home brewing club is hosting a contest in September that is affiliated with the High Plains Brewer of the Year contest. I am one of the organizers of the event and will also serve as Head Steward for the contest.
I am leaning towards making a Brown Porter, but I might make a Roggenbier for the contest.

Fucking hell did I brew a lot this weekend. Wife is gone til tuesday night, so I got it all out of the way. Saturday afternoon I did a saison in a new and interesting way... malt/hop bill:

US 6-Row (5.5#)
White Wheat (0.75#)
Munich Light (1.25#)
Acidulated Malt (0.2#)
Caramunich I (0.5#)

0.5oz Hallertau (whole) & 1oz Spalt for 60 mins
0.5oz Hallertau (whole) & 1oz Spalt for 10 mins I think? Wrote it in my notebook. Recipe was 15 mins but I usually delay at the end.

...so a lot going on, should be complex and bready in the body. And to get the wheat to kick over, there's all that 6-row (with its grainy flavor but high diastatic power) and then a more complex mash schedule than I'm used to:

30 mins at 122F
90 mins at 150F
Mashout at 165 I think?

I wound up with a lowish yield. Was expecting around 1.040, and wound up in the 30's. So I should come in just under 4%. Shit will be a little refreshing than I intended, but that's cool.


And then Sunday, a friend came over to bottle the stout we made for his birthday present. It came out fantastic -- 5.5 gallons of 7.9%abv, clean and roasty and awesome tasting. So he and his lady bottled that / helped me entertain the 4 yr old while I made a DIPA. Malt / hop bill:

US 2-row (12#)
Honey Malt (2#) so my usually 2 ingredients there, slightly less 2 row than usual. I often use 14# of it.

2oz old-as-hell organic Admiral hops (13%) from the freezer for 60 mins. They smelled fine, just weak. Perfect for wasting on bittering.
2oz Amarillo & 2oz Centennial at 5mins
2oz Amarillo % 2oz Centennial & 2oz Sorachi Ace at flame-out. And then I did my usual trick of "washing the bowling ball" with the hops in the grain sack to circulate wort through them REALLY well for a good half an hour before I kicked on the chiller. Pulled the hops at about 140F as usual.

Yield was VERY good on this run, higher than I expected since I pulled my punch on the 2-row and only used 12 pounds. Came out at a little over 4 gallons and 1.086, so it could well wind up around 9% abv. That's also less hoppage than I normally use, but I didn't buy them online in bulk, so it was getting pricey at the local shop.

And for whatever fucking reason, in my spreadsheet I doubled the saison ingredients way back a few months ago when i worked it up. Now why I did that, I cannot guess. But I did. So that's what I bought. So then I figured it out on brewday, and cut everything in half. Thus, I have ingredients for another one (minus yeast and hops, but I could just use the admiral hops I have and pitch onto the lees on this batch.)

Thought some of you guys might be interested in this book on sours.

I bottled my double wit for Great Nebraska Beer Fest on Sunday, and really need to brew a beer for the contest we are hosting in September ASAP.
Most of my time has been spent on the business side of the contest and doing some promotions with Nebraska Beer Blog. We have got a lot of breweries and home brewing suppliers to sponsor categories and provide a crap ton of SWAG, so everything is coming along real well at this point in time.
It is our first year of hosting this event, and we are still expecting to have at least one or two major headaches before the event.

I'm brewing a Roggenbier according to the style guidelines tomorrow. I had wanted to brew this recipe or a Brown Porter recipe that I had been working on for the home brewing contest we are hosting in September, but time and money conspired against me in July. I decided to go with a Roggenbier this time, so I would have something ready for our Oktoberfest party. I'll save the Brown Porter for Thanksgiving.

How is the brewing going these days?

We are hitting the home stretch in regards to preparation for the Sower's Cup contest that the Lincoln Lagers are hosting on September 13th.
I spent two hours inside an industrial cooler at a local brewery last night helping to organize all the entries into their respective categories, and tonight we will begin to put all the numerical labels on the bottles and put them into the boxes we will using during the judging rounds.

I'm hoping we get done tonight, so I don't have to do it Friday night, but at least it looks like I won't need to help judge beers every day next week.

I have been on vacation for five weeks and haven't checked the board once. More later.

The last batch I did of the regular "doubleish" IPA (which I now call Beta Bomb, as I am trying to maximize beta acid isomerization), is carbed and conditioned and ready. And it's good, REALLY good. A little too carbed but not troublingly so. It is sticky-gooey good, loaded with Amarillo and Sorachi oils, smells like heaven, has no off flavors, and kicks you in the balls with close to 9% abv. It's dangerous. Both nights I've been back, I've had one with the intention of eventually moving on to a second one, and both times I got beyond-buzzed on just 12 ounces of it. Closest I've gotten to Heady yet for sure, and I think I could even stand to dial back to alcohol next time.

Just bottled the lager that I put in the chest freezer when the cow share ran out, could do one more before the new cow share arrives if I hurry. Got a birthday refractometer! Looking forward to using it. Drinking a single hop citra that a buddy and I made that turned out just lovely

Gave one of my BetaBombs to the boss, who is also a beer snob. He was very, very complimentary, which was cool but almost awkward. I don't handle that stuff well. I guess it's alright!

I am my own worst critic when it comes to home brewing. I wasn't terribly satisfied with the beer I made for Great Nebraska Beer Festival this year, and briefly considered not serving it to the public and staying home, but I didn't really want to be sitting on a five gallon batch of a beer I was disappointed in either. There was only one person whose opinion that I respect that clearly didn't enjoy the beer, but everyone else, including the vast majority of the public who tried it were exceedingly complimentary.

I bottled my Roggenbier yesterday. I'll be interested to see how it taste once it is fully carbonated. I have been making really big Belgian beers as of late, so it was hard to gauge it in its uncarbonated form. It tasted crisp and seemed to have a sufficient amount of spice from the Rye, but it might end up having too much clove like phenols as well.

I won my first home brewing medal tonight. I got second place in Category 20 ( Fruit Beers) at the Sower's Cup contest that our homebrew club organized and hosted for the High Plains Circuit (MN, ND, SD, IA, NE, KS. MO and OK). I lost by a half point to a beer that got second place in the Best of Show judging, and beat out a fellow club member that has brewed a beer for the GABF Pro-Am competition, so I was more than a little excited to score a 42.5 out of 50 in the judging round.
We had an excellent beer pairing dinner after the event and our guest of honor/keynote speaker was Michael Ferguson of Beer Geeks.

Oh shit, that's awesome! How much do you have left? Because now you have to scribble "award winning" on them bottles.

I have to do an inventory of my beer closet to find out how much I have left. I'm hoping it is enough to enter two more contests. The guy who beat me in this category was the High Plains Circuit home brewer of the year and he usually enters all but a handful of categories in every contest he enters. He offered to package my beers with his for a contest in Oklahoma, and wants our club to start subsidizing the cost of shipping beers to contest so that we can attempt to win High Plains Home Brew club of the year for the first time.

I already made the joke that I can add "Award Winning Home Brewer" to my resume.

Congrats!