Our story...

...seems far too truncated!

Brew Day - Feb 26, 2011

Our honey IPA turned out to be one of the finest tasting ales we've created.  It lacked clarity, but the head, texture, colour, and flavour were wonderful.  We'll be making that recipe again, although next time we'll be sure to have some Irish moss on hand to clarify it.

The Oat Loaf Stout fermented down to a specific gravity of 1.012.  It started at 1.054, so that tells us it is 5.56% alcohol by volume, which was right on target.  Initial samples suggest it will be very heavy and incredibly chocolatey.  Much more chocolatey than anything we've ever made.  We bottled it today.  Keizo was incredibly exited by the fact that we prepared the perfect number of bottles (88) and he capped all of the bottles without any mistakes.  The perfect bottling.

For today's brew, we had just picked up a load of base malts from Gilbertson & Page in Fergus.  We didn't, however, have much in the way of specialty malts other than peat smoked and chocolate.  We didn't really feel like making a wheat beer today (summer is a long way off).  Greg is not a fan of our heavily-peated beer that we call Exposed Peater.  So, after much discussion, we elected to try a more subdued version of our Exposed Peater, which we have called Wee Peater.  It contains about 1/5th of the peated malt and a little bit of caramunich and carared for flavour and colour.  The base was entirely English pale malt.

The mash was done at the perfect temperature (66°C) and sparged without blockage.  In fact, the entire brew was pretty uneventful.  The initial gravity reading indicated 1.052, which implied a 68% mash efficiency, which is on the high end of our normal range.  We finished clean-up by 6:30 pm (7 hours to bottle and brew).  It was the perfect brew day and I assume we've made the perfect beer.

Brew Day - Feb 5, 2011

The fermenter full of finished beer

February 5, 2011 saw a couple of firsts for us.  We finished the first use of our conical fermenter, and we did both a bottling and a brew in a single day.  Greg and I were there, as always.  Keizo came by to help with the bottling and milling grain.  And Gordon helped out a little.  Having 4 people really helped things go smoothly.

Honey IPA

We were bottling the Stone IPA clone we brewed on January 15.  We tried to make the recipe as close to Stone IPA as we could reasonably work out, but we added our own little twist:  honey malt.  It finished with 6.4% ABV and a nice hoppy aroma with a faint honey flavour.  We were very impressed with the fermenter, although the beer was not as clear as we're used to.  There was a bit of suspended matter in the beer, but we're attributing that to the fact that we didn't use any irish moss (because we were out).  Overall, we were very pleased with the beer and, of course, with the fermenter.

Boiling during a snow storm

The gravity reading for our Oat Loaf Stout

For the brew, we wanted to use up some of the darker malt that was getting a bit old.  It has been a chilly winter and we felt like making a good full-bodied beer.  An Oat Loaf Stout was the obvious choice.  We started with a chocolate stout and tossed in some flaked oats from the grocery store.  I'm a little concerned with the amount of chocolate malt that we added.  It will be chocolatey.  The mash went perfectly smoothly.  During the boil we were treated to a snow storm in which about 15 cm of snow fell in the 90 minutes for which we had the propane burner running.  The starting gravity turned out to be 1.054, so we're expecting about a 5.5% ABV beer with a rich chocolatey flavour and a smooth finish.  We shall see how it goes.  The fermenter claims it "may cause death" if over-filled.  We may have over-filled it slightly.  Hopefully Gordon survives his next laundry day.

The Oat Loaf Stout, ready to ferment