Category: Homebrew

Leo review

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This Saturday we will be bringing the APA Leonardo (Leonardo – 9stripe Brewing)to the meeting for the style of the month.

The purpose of our clubs style of the month is to let everyone bring in their version of a certain style for everyone to taste. This way you can get feedback and get some ideas about what works and don’t work.
I gotta say, this Leonardo will fit into the “what don’t work” slot.
I do not know where it went wrong really. I was using the hop burst technique of throwing all the hops in late. But using enough to keep the bittering where it should be.
I have used this a lot recently and it has worked great. This time however. I ended up with a beer that is not only, not nearly bitter enough for an APA, it has almost no hop taste or aroma.
I chose to use chinook and centennial. Perfect hop choices for this style. According to beersmith, if I throw them in around the 12 minute mark, I will end up with 40 IBU. Perfect for the style. And 12 minutes is perfect to get all the flavor out if them.
In reality what I got was in my estimation, about 15 IBU. And very little flavor. This beer would make a decent blonde or maybe cream ale. But certainly not an APA. Not even close.
It’s so far off that I even considered the possibility that I had used the wrong hops. But I went and checked the garbage can. And there were the packages of 13.2% chinook and 10.7% centennial.
It’s a drinkable beer. Just not what I wanted. But now to figure out what went wrong. After having great results before, then this one being way off, I’m not sure where to begin. But this will need a re brew

Prelude to a Disruption

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Making big beers, really big beers, is not something that I have done a lot of. 

Done a few “bigger” ones like the Black Feather stout and the Woot!zenbock (which reminds me, I need to re brew that one) 
Just a few months ago we did a barleywine that has been bulk aging for a few months, and is ready to be bottled up. 
But nothing as big as the one we have planned for tomorrow. The 11.5%, 93 IBU Imperial Stout known as Disruptor. 
Looking back at one of my failed attempts at a big stout, I found that you really really need to have a fully active, ready for action yeast cake ready to attack. As big as the yeast needs to be, a starter is a waste of time. So I made a small Ordinary Bitter just to produce the yeast cake needed. 
I didn’t wanna get too big and stress out the yeast. So I kept it small. I went with:
6.75 lb 2row
.5 lb 120
.5 oz target hops @60
.5 target hops @10
Windsor yeast
That’s it.
Put her in the fermenter about 2 weeks ago so she is ready to keg right before we dump tomorrow’s stout on the cake. 
I am worried about an active Windsor cake with this much food for it. We may have thermo nuclear meltdown

Leonardo

stoutmaker1 Comment

Finally got around to brewing the second of the Ninja Turtles beers. Leonardo. The first, Michelangelo the blonde ale was a success and I have been babying the last of the keg for a while now. 


Leonardo is an APA using centennial and chinooks. 
8 lbs 2 row
1/2 lb 20L
1/2 lb aromatic
1oz centennial @12
1 oz chinook @12
Mangrove Jack West Coast ale yeast 
Mashed at 148 for 80 min. 

Everything during mash and boil was great.  Beautiful day. 

Ended up .052. With 40 IBU.
Still like this Hopburst style.  Everything went in at 12 minutes. Even going into fermenter it was hoppy. 

But the yeast. Hrrmm. I was reading about it the day before I was brewed and there was quite a bit of talk of how long this yeast takes to crank it up. 
And lemme say, were they ever right. I pitched on Friday morning. As I write this it’s Monday morning and there are just now signs of life in there. 

Both Saturday and Sunday there was absolutely nothing going on.  I don’t know if I like that or not. I guessing it’s gonna take a long time to clean itself up. 
I hope not. I want this ready in 4 weeks

We will see