Back from the dead – Let’s Talk Hazies
It’s been 5 years since I last posted here which seems like an eternity ago.
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2016 Mellow Midnight Update
Well, here we are over a year later. For those that need caught up, I brewed a 12% Imperial Stout a little over a year ago, with a plan to age it on charred oak cubes for 12 months. The goal obviously being to see how well I could replicate the flavor of bourbon-barrel aged beers. I took pretty good notes during the process, since there was no way I could remember how things progressed over the twelve months. I typed everything in a Captain’s Log of sorts, so it’s easy to follow along.
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Happy Holidays
I wanted to take a minute and wish everyone happy holidays. Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but I absolutely want to thank you guys for the comments, emails, and kind words. It really means a lot to me. While I can’t promise that I’ll ever get back to blogging at the pace I did a few years ago, I have some good stuff planned in 2017, so keep an eye out.
Cheers and warm wishes!
Chocolate Coffee Stout 2.0
It’s party time! Kristen turns 30 this year, and we decided to have a bunch of family and friends over to celebrate. That also means that I need three full kegs of beer that will please a crowd. I tend to save the hoppier beers for last, so that means something dark or malty is first. I flipped through my past recipes until I found a Chocolate Coffee Stout that I brewed three years ago. I remembered this beer being very well received at the time, so it seemed like a great recipe for the party.
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How To Go From Grain To Glass Quicker
As home brewers, we often stress over every process of beer making, striving to make the best beer possible. But let’s face it, sometimes you need to make a batch fast. Over the years, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve squeezed a batch of beer in before a holiday, gathering, or party. I’ve gone from grain-to-glass in as little as ten days, and still been proud to put my name on the beer. So let’s talk about some of the techniques and considerations that can help you fill an empty keg, quickly.
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Special Bitter 2.0
Living in Phoenix, especially the East Valley, there has always been one staple in the local craft beer scene: Four Peaks Brewery. Just about every ASU student can look back fondly at time spent on the Four Peaks patio, enjoying some awesome food, drinking great beer, and people watching. They make a really nice Special Bitter called 8th Street Ale. It’s on tap all over town, and it’s really responsible for introducing me to traditional British styles. It’s a beer I’ve brewed in the past, but I’ve never been exactly happy with how it turned out. Approaching the holidays a few months ago, needing a drinkable beer, I figured it was time to give this Special bitter another shot.
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Welcome To The New BertusBrewery.com
I’m proud to welcome everyone to the new BertusBrewery.com. That’s right, we’ve got a brand new home! I’ve wanted to make the move to WordPress for awhile, and after four and a half awesome years, it’s time.
So after many, many long hours of tweaking templates, messing with CSS, fixing content that didn’t migrate properly, cleaning up permalinks, tweaking javascript for the Temp Monitor, lots of beer, and finally some DNS changes, here we are! I hope everyone enjoys the new site. Poke around and let me know what you think!
Cheers!
Copper Counterflow Chiller Build
I live in Arizona, so it should come as no surprise that chilling a batch of beer is a giant pain in the ass here. I’m lucky if my tap water gets under 90F in the summer, and I’ve never seen it fall under 70* in the winter. I bleed with envy at all those folks that can simply hook up a hose to their chiller and run 50* water through it. But alas, I live in the desert, and chilling wort sucks here.
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Citra Double IPA
Every now and then I decide to brew a clone recipe of a beer not to see how well I can replicate it, but rather just to be able to try it. The Zombie Dust Recipe I brewed a couple years ago was a good example. I couldn’t actually get my hands on Zombie Dust, so there wasn’t a point in comparing how close I got to the real thing. But given the massive hype it was nice to be able to taste roughly what Zombie Dust was like. Well, after hearing rave reviews of Kern River’s Citra Double IPA over the past few years, I decided to brew up a batch so I could see what it was all about.
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Mellow Midnight Imperial Stout
Here we are, it’s finally time to put my 12% Imperial Stout down for a nice long twelve month nap. To quickly recap, I’m brewing a huge imperial stout, and trying my best to mimic the barrel aging process for the beer. I’ve been wanting to brew a beer like this for a quite a long time, so it feels really good to finally get moving with it. I’ll skip over most of the barrel aging process, as I covered that in my last post.
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