As usual, here is my year in review post. And we did more stuff than I thought we were going to.

The year started off as usual by getting  the contest brews going. The usual Stouts and Milds, nothing really new or unusual here.

One of those contest beers did pretty good and we got to ramp it up at CopperState Brewing. It was a great time. Got to see first hand that professional breweries and us homebrewers are very close in procedures and techniques other than volumes. I’m pretty sure any homebrewer could jump in and brew just fine on the big systems. But it also solidified my not wanting to do it for a living.

A lot of new things in the brewery this year. Like Kveik yeast. I had to try what I thought was just going to be a fad, but this yeast was everything I heard it was. Hot fermenting, but clean. This has to be the biggest surprise of the year down here. We already have plans to use this quite a bit more this summer, and get some hard sensory profiles for the different strains.

While we have never had any water problems before, and always did carbon filtering, we decided to give one of our German Alt beers a specific water profile. We picked out a more Germanic of water. The beer came out fantastic, and while I could certainly feel the difference different water chemistry did. I’m not sure it was “better”. But different for sure. We are gonna play around a bit more with different Styles of beer and localised water profiles.

We also realised that we have been ignoring one of our favorite styles, the American Wheat. We did make a couple this year, but they never stuck around too long because they were fantastic. I want to focus a bit more on the American Wheat again, just because I like them.

But if you havent noticed already from our last several brews, we have started to produce more SmasH beers. Beers that use a Single malt and single hop variety.These SmasH beers are the perfect way to find out what a grain or hop has to offer. And with there being so many new hops and grains out there now, the combinations are endless. There will be more of these coming out soon.

2019 was bit of everything it seems. Trying new things, going back to old beers. And it was quite a fun time, but sporadic.

Looking ahead to 2020, we already have some sort of plan forming. The SmasH brewing is high on the list of things we are going to focus on. And I plan to be posting more informational and editorial posts to try and keep the sites more active.
Stay tuned for more!