pushing the envelope

I hit 1250 on my beer list last night.  And my untapped list is up to 1220, so just 30 beers to find hidden in there that I missed off my list somehow.  And I am slowly plowing through my ondeck beers.  Which is nice.  With a beer tasting at Nate's place on Tuesday, a few beers while watching the Blazers win last night, a beer/wine tasting event tonight, and Widmer coming with samples and discounts to Hop N Grape Friday, this is proving to be a pretty fun week.  Even if I do have to work all week instead of brew.

A Year of Brewing

So this month marks the one year mark of Gus and I brewing our first beer together.  That beer was a clone of Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale that we hopped up a little bit.  We named our version after Longview's most famous landmark, Lake Sacajawea.  Since then we have brewed about thirty batches and ended up with roughly two hundred gallons of beer between the two of us.  We started with small, extract-based beers brewed on Gus's stove and moved up to ten gallon all-grain batches as we improved.  Here's a look back at some of our memorable beers we brewed during the first year.

The First Three
After our first three batches had fermented we decided to have a small tasting party at my house.  At this tasting party we debuted our Beach Dog Brown, Sacajawea Pale Ale and CCWA NWPA.  For the most part our beers were a hit.  The Beach Dog could have used some more time to bottle condition and actually turned into a wonderful beer but the Sacajawea and CCWA were both fantastic.  We received a ton of positive feedback from our friends and I feel that really pushed us to keep improving our beers.

My First Recipe
After our first handful of batches I decided that I wanted to try to make my own beer recipe.  My inspiration for this beer was the now defunct Roots Brewing Calypso, a spicy sweet wheat beer that was perfect for some summertime drinking.  I took a basic wheat ale recipe but added a blend of apricots and peaches to sweeten it up with some Serrano peppers to supply a little kick of spice.  The beer turned out pretty good but it wasn't exactly what I was hoping for.  I do know that some of my friends really enjoyed it as Matt Jones is constantly asking me when I will be brewing it again.

My Favorite Beer
This is probably the toughest to name as I feel like we've brewed some pretty amazing beers.  Our first barrel-aged beer, Gnate's Gnarleywine is pretty phenomenal.  Our new session IPA Don't Worry, Be Hoppy is also pretty amazing.  St. Helens Stout turned out even better than I thought it would and is definitely one of my favorites.  But if I had to narrow it down to one brew above the rest I would probably have to go with the Judge GYO IIIPA.  We named our triple IPA after a retired judge that sold Gus the all-grain set-up.  Since he wasn't going to be homebrewing anymore he also gave us bags of hops that he had been growing (and continues to hook us up with hops).  We decided to brew a big IPA in his honor as our first all-grain batch we brewed together.  We may not have hit our temperatures and our beer turned out a couple points lower than anticipated but it was still an amazing beer and I would love to have it again.

My Least Favorite Beer
This one is actually a pretty easy call for me.  After Gus and I really started experimenting with our ingredients and different yeast strains Gus decided to brew another version of our CCWA NWPA.  But instead of fermenting it with our original yeast he decided to ferment with a hefeweizen yeast.  The resulting esters left from the yeast totally over-powered everything else in the beer.  If you were a fan of Belgian beers you would probably love this but I went to another tap when it was time for a refill.

Plans for the Future
I feel like we will definitely keep at the all-grain brewing and start to refine our recipes a little bit.  We're also planning on brewing a couple of really, really big beers with some friends we have made in the local home-brew community.  One of these beers will be a Sam Adams Utopias clone and the other will be our take on Dogfish Head's 120 minute IPA.  I'm really excited to see how these monsterous beers turn out.  I'm also in the process of planning my build for my own all-grain setup.  After messing around with Gus on his I was able to really plan out what I wanted and what I didn't.  I probably won't have it built for another year but that will give us time to get our processes all worked out.  I'm just really happy that I've found this hobby and I don't see myself ever quitting.  Cheers!

a little slip

So first I bought a couple beers at Hop N Grape when I was in for some brewing supplies.  But they were for Abby, so no harm no foul.  Then I was back in there to get two pelican beers to taste along side the other two I have chilling.  And I bought one of the new Widmer beers too.  So again, bought three beers only.  Which is good.  But not exactly NO BEERS like my resolution.  But way better than before.

I plan to have the MacPelican's, the Wee Heavy, the Stormwatcher's, and the Mother of All Storms on one super lineup of beers one of these days.  But it's roughly $50 worth of beer for four beers, and the Mother is 14% ABV and the others are 5%, 8.5% and 12.7%, so it's not a solo mission.  Likely an Erik, Nate and Barb mission.  Probably my dad too.

And after a few days, I'm only up to 1232 because I've had mostly home brew the last couple days, plus found a redundancy or two on my list so it offset a couple new ones.  But I did find a bunch of missed ones on untapped, so now my untapped list is only 30 behind my actual list, so I think I might be able to catch the two up.  And we have tons of homebrew fermenting and are making more this month.  So all is good.

So far so good

I've been to Hop N Grape twice since my resolution.  The first I bought only what we needed to brew for Shaun's batch.  The second to get something I was missing.  And I only bought three 12oz beers, one specifically for someone and the other two for Abby.  So I have resisted the urge to stock up on more beers I haven't had before.  And I am actually getting through some of the ones on deck.  And finished two of our beers.  So far so good.  But as I run down my list to see I am at 1231 so far, I see I have a long way to go.  Still a lot of beers ondeck, probably close to 50 still if you include the ones I am cellaring until later this year.

So maybe by Nate's birthday I might be able to buy some more new beers.  And considering we are going to the Dark Arts Stout Festival at Fort George, that is a good thing.  Because I will need to buy some beers...

New Years Resolution

I have a ridiculous number of beers in my fridges.  Just the fact that it is now fridges (plural) means that my new years resolution was easy this year.  And one I have a 50/50 shot of sticking with.  I will not buy anymore new beers until I get through what I have ondeck already.  It's still way over 50 beers to taste.  Not to mention all of our own beer we have made, the tons of beers that I have already had before but I had to buy a second time, and all the beer we are still making.

I pledge to not buy multiple beers at Hop N Grape until my ondeck stash is limited to single digits and/or one fridge and not three.

PS, I am at 1200 distinct beers.  I can't make Untapped match up with that figure without spending a day going through every brewery to see which beers I missed checking into, so at some point I may just have to cheat.

Like the guy I saw yesterday that had checked into a homebrew from Crockett Brewing I created a few days before and hadn't checked into yet.  Going in to my wish list and finding I am the 2nd to check into a beer was weird.  Even weirder was the fact that he got his newbie badge the day before, and WAS ALREADY UP OVER 600-800 beers in two days.  I have added some backlog in bunches before, but as soon as he ads beers he couldn't have possibly have tasted, you know he is full of shit.

Or the guy from Rio that checked in to one of our home brews.  Not likely stud.  You are a cheater.

But if they can do it, why can't I.  I think I'll just check into some shit beers I am sure I had a long time ago that I don't remember.  Or past versions of beers I have had.  I just want untapped to match my list without spending 6 hours at the computer...

I also completed the Advent Calender/New Years Countdown fridge on New Years.  There are still a bunch of beers in that fridge (see above) as I was thinking of going for Superbowl Countdown, but the photo taking, posting, copying, etc. to instagram, facebook, here, etc. were just too much.  Feel free to find all my sweet pics on facebook.  I've decided not to cut and paste for sake of sanity.

end of the world eve

It's a few more hours until the rapture, so thought we would get one last post in.  We had a few beers from the beer advent calendar and from the other beer fridges, and checked in on the bubbling IPA.  All in all a nice relaxing night.  Also got to watch the Blazers win.  And with the additional beers checked off, I am at 1174 beers on my list.  I should hit 1200 by New Years.  Great Success!

The beer advent calendar is going great, with more and more people mentioning to me that they have seen my posts and wondering what the next one will be.  I mentioned the idea to Dave at Hop n Grape half heartedly, but as I thought, if I had pushed the idea on him of beer advent calendars and 12 beers of Christmas a lot harder, he could have sold a ton more beer than he is already selling.  Man, if I only had my own brewery or specialty brew store.  I would be killin it.

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.

Dogg Haus Brewing

Hello to both of our readers!  Thought I'd drop by to give you both an update on L-Town Brewing's recent developments.
 
About a month and a half ago I was sitting home on a Saturday morning and I was really wanting to brew some beers.  Unfortunately for me, Gus was at the beach with his family and all of our brewing gear was at his house.  Since he picked up the all grain system from the judge we haven't used the old extract brew kettle that we started on.  I asked him if I could borrow it to brew at my place and just like that the L-Town Dogg Haus Brewery was born.  Why Dogg Haus you ask?  Well if you've ever been to my house you know that my dogs, Barney and Lola, pretty much run the place.

So after picking up the brew kettle and some other various supplies I had my first brew day at the Dogg Haus.  The very first beer brewed was quite the experiment and I honestly have no idea how it's going to turn out.  I started with a basic porter recipe that was pretty light on the roasted malts.  It also has a very low hop presence.  Before the boil started I added some baker's chocolate and with fifteen minutes left in the boil I added a bunch of peanut butter.  And just like that our Peanut Butter Cup Porter was born. 

After I finished the Peanut Butter Cup Porter I started right away with batch number two.  Batch number two is a Scottish Ale that I added some smoked malt to.  I have had a couple of very good smokey ales lately and this should be right there with them.  In addition to the smokey flavor this beer should also have some oak and whiskey notes as it is currently aging in the whiskey barrel.  We will be bottling this one sometime in the next week or so and it should be fantastic.  If you can't already tell, I have very high hopes for this beer.  We decided to honor Kelso's Scottish heritage with the name and called this beer Highlander Smoked Scottish Ale.

So a week after brewing the Peanut Butter Cup Porter and Highlander Smoked Scottish Ale I wanted to brew again.  My lovely girlfriend was in town and we decided to jump onto Homebrew Talk to try to find a new and exciting recipe.  What caught her eye was an Apple Pie Ale.  The recipe uses a pale ale as a base and we added some vanilla beans and cinnamon sticks to the boil.  At flame out we dropped in some pure maple syrup.  This beer is currently sitting in secondary and will be kegged most likely tomorrow.  Before I transfer it into the keg I will be adding four ounces of apple extract.  We decided to name this one Grandma's Apple Pie Ale after my grandma's delicious home-made apple pies.

A few days after I brewed Grandma's Apple Pie Ale I decided to brew up a batch of hefeweizen for Mrs. G aka Gus's wife aka Abby.  The recipe I used wasn't the same as before but it should still be a tasty hefeweizen.  Since hefeweizens ferment so quickly this beer will actually be going into a keg tomorrow and be on tap at Gus's in about a week.  Hopefully Abby enjoys it.  Since she has been so understanding with our brewing addiction we're going to try to keep hefeweizen on tap at all times.

I was still itching to brew a week after finishing Abby's Hefeweizen so I decided to swing by the homebrew store and see if I could come up with something to brew.  After checking out the hop selection I decided to brew another batch of our CCWA NWPA.  This was the third beer we brewed and it was definitely the hit of the party when we had our first tasting.  I figured another batch of a beer that everybody loves wouldn't be a bad thing.  It's almost done fermenting and should be racked into secondary this weekend and dry-hopped a few days after that.

With all of the extract brews done we are finally going to break the all-grain rig out again this weekend.  I've got a session IPA recipe pretty much dialed in.  It's got four different types of hops and a pretty small grain bill.  It should finish up around 4% ABV with about 65 IBUs.  It will be delicious.  I'm just excited to brew all-grain again.  We'll be buying all of our supplies for the session IPA in bulk and have enough to brew four 10 gallon batches of this beer so we'll have a ton of bottles and a couple of kegs each. 

We also have some Barleywine and Imperial Kahlua Stout bottled and conditioned.  Gus and I will be tasting a couple of those tomorrow while we keg and bottle.

Cheers!

Success

Winter Brew Fest was a success.

I tried every beer I hadn't had before.  They were all good except the Cranberry Stout from Westport.  And I only had one full beer and the rest just tastes, so I could function afterwards and everything.  I ended up with some extra tickets, but if I'm super lucky I won't lose them and maybe they will be good next year.

The only downside (besides the cranberry stout of course) was that I couldn't go back the next day.  I didn't get to try Brrr and a handful of others that I have already had but still would have liked to drink if I had more time.  Plus that Hawaiian food truck had AWESOME food and I want to get more.

And with that and a couple more beers from the Advent Calender, I just hit 1140.  I am a rock star.

On the 7th day of Christmas...

...we are going to the vancouverwinterbrewfest and going to really go for the record for new beers this month and try to push the limit upwards of 40-50.  Should be fun.

There are 18 beers I haven't had, and I am at 1118 on my list, so I should be somewhere around 1130-1140 by tomorrow I hope.

If you aren't following along on facebook, here you go.  Beers #1-6 of the Advent Calender.  Tonight I won't have beer #7 until after brewfest.

They read like this...On the first, second, third, etc. day of Christmas, Beer Fridge gave to me...

New Years Eve Countdown Fridge

Nate in I got in a quick email war.  Something about me calling him out on facebook about asking a silly question which I had already answered.  Specifically, what was the 2nd beer from My Beer Advent Calendar.  These last two meme's = Nate Wins.

But more importantly, what is my Beer Advent Calendar?  Thanks for asking.  It is simply the best idea I've had (someone else thought up and I stole) all month.

I filled up our wine fridge (currently not being used because I buy too much beer) with 20 beers from my other fridges.  And I let my three year old label the bottoms of the bottles in random order.  WAHLAH!  Random beer every day in December (once I get the beers that Nate went shopping for me in Seattle to get so I could put in a few true random ones).  And I will likely do the thing through New Years and call it New Years Eve Countdown Fridge.  Or I survived the apocalypse and now have a giant supply of beer... or something like that.  Maybe 365 Beer Fridge.  Stock it every month.  Maybe Bed Bath and Beyond, maybe Home Depot.  I don't know if we'll have enough time...

Anyways, I am rocking pictures on facebook and instagram, and then pictures on untapped, so the internet better get a second server.  Cause I'm filling it up this month before the world ends.  Speaking of which, I should probably put the last few Elysian Apocalypse beers in here before the 12th or 21st or whenever it is that cats and dogs start living together...Definitely gonna have to change this to New Years Eve Countdown Fridge...

Beer Advent

http://2012.beeradvent.com/
http://2011.beeradvent.com/
http://2010.beeradvent.com/
beeradvocate.com/community/threads/beer-advent-calendar

I can't believe I never thought of this before.  365 beers just doesn't work.  Too hard to drink every single day.  Or more importantly, too hard to only drink one new beer every day and not go over.  So the natural progression was to just see how many different beers I could drink.  Forever.  I am well over 1000 now after a bunch in 07-08 and then starting again this year and trying to fill in some from memory the ones in betwee.  (you know, during the lapse of focused efforts for the few years after I lost my list in 08 and during the time I moved, and since we were blessed with a son and now a second one).  But now I am again focused on the task at hand.

Wow, I suck at transitions, and that was a rambling paragraph.  But where I was going with that was, I am going to turn my wine fridge that we aren't using (drink a lot of beer, wine and alcohol kind of get forgotten) into a Beer Advent Calender.  I could just doctor up a couple empty 22oz boxes, but then the beer isn't cold.  And you can't drink very many beers warm, at least I don't like to.  Hence a use finally for the wine fridge.  I am going to have Nate stock it with 24 of the 80 or so awesome beers I already have ondeck.  Mix it up a little, make it exciting.  And even go to the store for a few surprises that I haven't had before.

My hope is that I will forget about half the stuff I have in the fridge anyways, and that plus the new ones will make for some good surprises next month.  And A Very Merry Christmas.  Hopefully have the ends facing out with numbers.  I'll post a picture once I get it done.  Something like this.

brew brew brew

Nate has been hella brewing at the satellite office of L-Town Brewing, the L-Town Dogg Haus Brewery.  He finally brewed up his Peanut Cup Porter, and then went crazy and brewed a second batch and made it a Smoked Scottish ale.  Then he went even crazier and brewed this weekend too with an apple pie beer.  We should be fully stocked for the apocalypse next month.  Especially if we can get some Hef and IPA brewed this month too.

Meanwhile we are also going crazy trying new beers, I still have way too many in my fridge since I keep buying them, and he and Barb keeping buying crazy new beers in Seattle and Portland when they travel.  Plus he is hooking up some beer exchanging with some enthusiasts in the Midwest.  All that leading up to me hitting 1102 last night with new beers.  And considering I have 72 in the fridge I haven't had, another 20 at least I have already had, a few homebrews still and three kegs, plus a closet full of homebrew...wow, sounds like a lot when I say it that way...

On my way to 1111

I hit 1088 beers last night.

I just passed Tracy McGrady and Cuttino Mobley in 3s, and hope to catch Dana Barros tonight who has 1090 over his career.  That will put me at #51 on the all time leader board.

Also, if I can get to 1111 I can pass Kareem for all time defensive rebounds in a season and be #1 since they only tracked off/def rebound splits back to 1985 it looks like.  Before that guys like Wilt and Bill Russell used to get 1500-2000 every season and likely most of those were defensive, so probably would blow Kareem's record up, but I do what I can to be #1, even if its going off incomplete records...

It's Stout Day

25-must-try-west-coast-stouts-for-international-stoutday
Brewpublic is awesome.
Plan to get three badges on untapped tonight.  Stout Day.  Flying Saucer stout badge.  And 1000 beers.  That's right, I finally have almost all of my beers logged into untapped, and will hit 1000 with a stout tonight.  I actually have a couple new stouts to try in the fridge, but will likely go with the Elysian Apocalypse beer 10 stout.  It sounds sooo good.