Renewed Spirit(s)

I guess the raspberry wheat incident hit me pretty hard as I have not been able to post a bierwerke report since. This weekend though the fire returned as a new brewer is joining the fold. Oh, we weren’t neglecting the werkes, two batches are fermenting and one is ready for bottling. Mike’s Russian Imperial Stout with bourbon infusion is still going to take a while but Dave’s sloppy seconds brew is ready for transfer.

We welcome Robert to the fold. Yesterday the two of us hit the brew supply store and got the ingredients for a summer wheat similar to Dave’s original recipe. My ingredients for a Strong Ale are still sitting in Dave’s basement awaiting time where we can brew it, hopefully that’s tomorrow.

Our last brew date was January 19, two days after our first loss (bow heads please). Brewing Mike’s stout was a hoot. He had so much grain, about 22 pounds, we couldn’t believe it. After we got his wort boiling we checked and there was still a good amount of sugar left in the sparge water. We continued to sparge enough out of it to get another five gallon batch of beer. We had some remaining hops from previous batches and Dave had cultured some yeast. So, there you have it, a no-recipe, complete from scratch brew unexpectedly culled from leftovers, thus the Sloppy Seconds moniker.

But alas, the time allotted to concocting the rescue brew prevented me from brewing my batch. The darn weather and power outages have also added to the delay. It’s a good thing I picked up a couple kegs from BBC to hold me over. And even an ice storm and loss of electricity doesn’t stop CO2 from pushing beer through lines. The beer remained at a cool temperature throughout the five days even unrefrigerated. At least Old Man Winter and Mother Nature didn’t knock my sanity closet out of commission.

Tomorrow we’ll see how adding new personality to the group improves the beer.