Oktoberfest 2013

Lowell Brewing Co. held a little event this past weekend. We threw an Oktoberfest party and wow, what a great time it was. 50 lbs. of home-smoked meats, 20 gallons of LBC beer, about 100 people, and a bouncy castle for the kiddos. Yep, that's right, a bouncy castle. We also raised some money for the Love for Lyons fund which is helping the people of Lyons after the flooding. It was a really great time in the backyard! Thanks everyone for showing up.

On another note, the Great American Beer Festival is coming up this weekend! Let's all root for Wampum Porter to bring home a medal. I won't be able to make it this year due to a planned trip, but my beer will be poured at the Pro-Am booth on Thursday if anyone is planning on attending that evening. I had a bottle of it this weekend and it is tasting great! Fingers crossed...

Infinity IBU IPA

I had some hops that were a couple of years old that I wasn't using...so why not put them into an Imperial IPA?!! Here is the hop bill that I ended up with

Flameout

Summit 19oz

Bravo 17 oz

Centennial 10 oz

Crystal 6 oz

Cascade 4 oz. 

Magnum 4 oz. 

Dry Hop

Columbus 3 oz. 

Centennial 3 oz

Crystal 3 oz

Cascade 2 oz. 

That is over 4 lbs. of hops! The wort turned into green slurry immediately and it was a little difficult to separate the wort from the hops into the fermentor. I started with 8 gallons of wort and ended up with only 4 gallons into the fermentor! This one will definitely be for the hopheads.

Hops anyone?

Wampum Porter is All Grown Up

I brewed Wampum Baltic Porter up at C.B. & Potts in Fort Collins this past Friday and it went great. This is my 2013 Great American Beer Festival ProAm entry. We hit all of the numbers for my recipe. Kirk and Eric were great to work with up there and I appreciated their attention to detail with every aspect of my recipe from start to finish. We brewed 15 barrels of my beer, which equates to almost 500 gallons! We used a little over 1200 lbs. of grain. It was huge. If the fermentation goes as planned, we should be sitting at around 8.7% ABV. For those of you that don't know, a Baltic Porter is a higher strength porter brewed with a lager yeast. Therefore, it turns out to be dangerously drinkable!

The brewery. 15 bbl brewhouse with 2x30 bbl fermentors and 2x15 bbl fermentors

Milling a small portion of the 1200 lb grain bill

Mashing In

Row, row, row the mash....

1st runnings from the mash tun into the kettle, yum

Shoveling out the mash tun

Getting ready for the 2nd hop addition.  I missed out on jumping inside the hot mash tun to clean it...oh well

Into the kettle with the Sterling hops

It was a great day of brewing and I'll keep everyone posted about when the beer will be ready for consumption!

On a smaller note, I'll be brewing my Oktoberfest beer this weekend at home to be ready by the end of September. I'll be using an Augustiner lager yeast for fermentation. The guys at C.B. & Potts were nice enough to give me some of the same yeast out of the fermentor cone that is being used to ferment my Wampum Baltic Porter! Perfect. I will also be brewing a Double IPA with all of my older hops...it will be crazy. I am shooting for an 8.5% ABV beer with about 3 lbs. of hops in it. I was sick of looking at the hops that I never use, so why not try to use them all at once! How about Infinty IBU IPA for a name?

Sandbox American Wheat is conditioning in the kegs and Cottonwood Abbey is finishing up in the fermentor.

Suggestions for Summer Beers?

The taps are drying up quickly and I'm looking for suggestions for my next 3-4 brews. Not looking to make any dark ales...nice, crisp refreshing summer beers would be nice. IPA? IIPA? Belgian Pale Ale? Wheat? Kolsch? Belgian Blond?

What's you favorite style of beer to drink when it is 80 degrees outside or when the sun is setting after a hot day?

Heading Back to the Great American Beer Festival!!!

I had a handful of beers entered into a home brew competition that was held a couple of weeks ago in Fort Collins and I won some medals. I won two gold medals for my Western Slope Peach Saison and Wampum Baltic Porter. I also won two silver medals for Micah's Blonde Ale and Pebonkas Imperial Stout. It was a pretty rewarding experience to hear my name called for all of the beers with my family there with me. Better than the medals was the fact that one of the local breweries chose my beer to brew for the 2013 Great American Beer Festival! This is now the 2nd time that this has happened in two years and it is incredible. C.B. & Potts (a brewpub chain) chose to brew my Wampum Baltic Porter at a commercial scale for entry into the ProAm competition. Before they announced this, another professional brewer came up to me and told me that they also wanted to brew my Western Slope Peach Saison at their brewery for the competition. Unfortunately, only one ProAm entry is allowed per amateur brewer! The two brewers flipped a coin for the entry and CB&P won. Learning about that from the other brewer was very rewarding. There were 600 beers in the competition, so I feel really good about how mine fared. 

To find out more about the Great American Beer Festival and the ProAm competition, check out this website: http://www.greatamericanbeerfestival.com/ . With 50,000 people and 700 breweries...it's a big deal.

I'll keep everyone posted on the brew date and how the beer turns out. A date has not been decided for the brew day yet, but hopefully it will be in the next couple of months. Once again, this is an exciting opportunity and this year I'm hoping to medal with the big boys on a national stage!