Don't Worry, Be Hoppy

Yesterday Gus and I made our first attempt at brewing our session IPA, Don't Worry, Be Hoppy.  We were inspired by Lagunitas new session IPA Daytime.  Just like Daytime we're hoping that this is going to be the perfect beer to enjoy with just about anything.  It should check in at about 4% ABV with about 75 IBUs.  We used two-row grain as our base and added a couple of other grains to add some flavor.  We used Chinook hops for our bittering and a mixture of Cascade, Citra and Nelson Sauvin for the finishing hops.  The smell of the hop combination was absolutely amazing at the end of the boil. 

We were joined during our brew-day by Garrett Booth of the Booth FLD Brewhouse.  He brought up a couple of his tasty beers and we enjoyed his Absinthal Gourd Ale (pumpkin beer), Yamaltonic Ale (yam beer) and his Cascadian Dark Ale which I forget the name of.  They were all delicious but my favorite was the CDA.  It started off like a nice tasty porter and then Boom!, the hops hit you.  Very well balanced and very, very delicious.  We also enjoyed a Founders Breakfast Stout, Lagunitas Daytime, Bear Republic's Hop Rod Rye and finished the brew day off with some L-Town barrel-aged Snow Patrol Ale.  The barrel-aged Snow Patrol is probably one of the best beers Gus and I have made.  It reminds me of Firestone Walker's Parabola and I can think of a ton of worse beers to be compared to.

We did have a couple of minor set-backs during our brewing but luckily it wasn't anything major that we couldn't overcome.  Our first issue was one of our burners shooting orange flames but Garrett ended up taking the burner apart and after that it worked like a charm.  We've always had problems with our pump not pumping correctly.  Yesterday was no different but we were able to move the mash tun onto the ground and gravity fill it from our brew kettle.  We suffered for a while when we were sparging but I was able to slow the flow from the mash tun to the boil kettle so it all worked out.  About halfway through our sparging something clicked in the pump and it started working correctly.  In our haste of focusing most of our attention on the pump we let our sparge water get too hot.

All in all it was a successful brew day and our first batch of Don't Worry, Be Hoppy should be fermenting happily in Gus's closet.  We will be brewing this beer three more times to try to get our all-grain brewing processes in line so both of you readers out there will get to sample it.