1.042 post boil at 6g
I have wanted to brew a sour for a while now so I took a run at this easy recipe. It is a very simple recipe and has won many awards, so I am hopeful that my several year investment will be worth the return. I brewed this on my 10 gallon electric kettle and the whole hops completely clogged my recirculation pump during chilling. I finally got it cooled using my old immersion chiller. I just knew there was a reason I kept that thing sitting around collecting dust. 
There are only a few beers in my humble opinion that live up to the hype. Pliny the Elder being one of them and Heady being another. I had Heady a few years ago and thought is was really good, but not exceptional. I'm not sure if it is due to their recent brewery ramp up, or due to the fact that the case I received from my friend Shawn was straight from the brewery, but I was blown away by my latest sampling of Heady. It has an amazing dankness to it, peachy flavors, with waves and waves of hops. It also blows me away that it is so good from the can. The warning on the can is absolutely correct, drink it from the can. I've had it from a glass and from the can and the can wins every time. I brewed this clone from an online brew shop. The shop did not give the exact details of the hops, but they said they would "work" with me if I liked the beer. I didn't use their S-05, but used the actual Conan yeast that I received from a buddy on HBT. Since I have a 1/2 case left of the real Heady, I was dying to brew this one up. I brewed this on my full HERMS system and hit all numbers spot on, awesome. 
Dry Hop Mix of Chinook, Simcoe and Cascade 
I really wanted to brew this IPA with all NZ hops. They have been growing some really interesting varieties lately. I brewed this as a tandem brew with my Heady Topper clone. I did a single batch sparge and came up rather short on volume, but hit my target gravities exactly. I think I rushed the runoff. My recirculation pump overheated as well so the mash temps were a bit off. The 1056 took off in a matter of hours and produced a really nice krausen. The 4 oz dry hop should be tasty.
Results:.jpeg) |
| Now that is a hop addition! |
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| Smells super fresh |
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| First time with whole hops, oh my! |
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| The finished product |
When I first started brewing I was very hesitant to enter homebrew competitions. I finally summoned up the courage to enter a local competition with a few extract brews that I thought were decent. The beers scored well, not award winning by any stretch, but respectable. I was much more focused on the overall score than the comments. As my brewing knowledge expanded, the reverse has now occurred. I am much more interested in the comments than the overall score.
I entered my Dale's Pale Ale, Chocolate Stout and English Cider into the 30th Annual Kansas City Bier Meisters Competition and all scored well, with the English Cider taking 2nd place in the cider category. I am still awaiting the score sheets so I am anxious to see the comments. The beers were the best beers I have produced, in my humble opinion. The 2nd place cider award is "my" first winner. I put "my" in quotes because the history of the cider is somewhat comical. My sister actually brewed this batch back on December 30, 2011. I racked it after a month and put it in the secondary as usual. However, we ended up selling our house and moving a month later so I had to decide whether to throw it out or throw it in a keg. I chose to put it in a keg and that keg ended up sitting in a storage locker for 6 months. A few months later I decided to put the keg in my kegerator and carb it up, not expecting it to be any good. Much to my surprise, the cider was excellent. So after almost 14 months of ageing, I entered the cider into the competition and took that 2nd place award. Funny how things turn out.
This brew was part of my segmented brewing experiment. I
used my single kettle e-BIAB setup with a full volume continuous
recirculation run off my Johnson Controls A419 temperature controller. I created a make-shift thermowell out of thermoplastic tubing and brass barbed connections and snaked the probe through the top of the kettle barbed fitting. It worked well in testing and during the mash. I then ran off the wort into a bucket to hold until the sparge was complete on the sister brew that was going through my HERMS system. Once the mash was complete over there I dumped the wort into the HERMS kettle, sanitized and waited for the next night to boil. 66.8% efficiency, which wasn't that bad considering it was no sparge and the grain had been around a while. Again, souring is the main enemy of segmented brewing and this one did smell a bit funky when I opened up the kettle before the boil. There was a lot of foam on top of the wort. I boiled off an extra 10 minutes before adding my first hop addition to drive it all off. It smelled fine going into the fermenter so only time will tell. This was an interesting brewing experience. Here is my time breakdown:
