Life has a way of filling up pretty quickly.  But, no excuses.  I haven't been as diligent as I want with this blog.  Now that Thanksgiving is over, maybe I can get back in the swing of things. For this post, I am going to review our pumpkin beer, Fairytale Debacle . Appearance The beer looks great.  It is one of the clearest beers I have brewed with an amber color, almost with an orange tint.  The head is nice and fluffy.  Very respectable pint of beer, if I do say so myself. Aroma I get some spice flavors coming through the nose, though, not a whole lot.  Has a good malt presence, too.  Nothing to overpowering, but pleasant. Flavor Good beer, easy drinking.  I get a bit of pumpkin flavor with some spice, but not a whole lot going on.  The spice flavors are more subtle and in the background.  Also, I think there is too much nutmeg or ginger which gives it a bit of a sharp aftertaste, but that is not unpleasant and mellow...

As our homebrew club did about a year ago, we again decided to age a beer in a bourbon barrel.  The Belgian Dubbel turned out nicely last time and this year we are upping our game and going for a Russian Imperial Stout.  ( Here is the brew sheet for the RIS. ) To be honest, there isn't a whole lot of stuff for me to talk about... 11 of us brewed 5 gallons of the beer and brought it to our local meeting place, Canal Street, and all siphoned our individual beers into the one barrel.  We'll let it sit for a couple to a few months and transfer back out into our individual kegs/carboys.   I have an idea on a few questions you may be asking, so let me take a stab at what may be on your mind. How did you get a barrel? One of the main guys in starting the club, Colin Presby, works for Weyerbacher Brewing.  They use Maker's Mark barrels for some of their brews.  Last year, he got one of their barrels after it was used.  Thi...

For those who may be behind in blog reading, a while ago I decided to do a little yeast experiment.  I brewed one batch of beer, divided it into three fermenters, and added different yeast to each.  You can read more about the exploits in my previous post - Yeast Experiment: Episode I. I decided to brew a pale ale, since that is a recipe I would like to have as a staple.  Everyone should be able to brew a nice pale ale, right?  This project would give me a good head start on what yeast to use in that staple recipe.  I played around with malts and hops for a while, settling on a recipe heavy in late hop additions.  But I wanted a little more flair in my beer so I added a pound of orange blossom honey at knockout.  For the three yeasts, I used Wyeast 1968, Wyeast 1450, and White Labs 051. I fermented and bottled, and this past week I took three bottles of my yeast experiment over to some friend's house (shout out to Kate and Dave!) to get their...

One of the best things about making your own beer is drinking your own beer.  And, if you are like me, when you drink your own beer, it will either be horrible or the best beer you have ever had in your life.  Ever.  You put your own effort into this beer which you are now drinking.  You want it to be good, and if it is good, in your mind, that is great!  But classifying your beers into one of two categories ("horrible" or "great") is not very helpful.  So, today I want to talk about objectively rating your own beer. There are many ways to rate beers, but a good way I have found is to just use the Beer Judge Certification Program 's method.   They provide a nice score sheet (which the judges use in competition).  I'm not a BJCP judge, but why reinvent the wheel?  The sheet is helpful and can help you be a little more critical of your own beers.  And as an example, I am going to use my IPA which finished up a couple of weeks ...

So, at a homebrew meeting a few months back, someone brought in a Citra IPA (citra being the hops he used).  The beer was fantastic.  I'm not a beer judge, so I don't have all the fancy language to describe its flavor, but, just trust me, it was good.  At that moment, Eric and I decided we would try to brew a Citra IPA. We worked out a recipe based off of our previous IPA batches, switched up the hops to include 80% citra, and went at it.  Round 1 went pretty well.  But we didn't nail it.  Our IPA was good, don't get me wrong, but it was too bitter.  The 20% "other" we used brought that bitterness to the party.  We decided to go for Round 2 and use 100% citra hops.  We reworked the recipe and took the list to the store.  Well, at Weak Knee Homebrew, they didn't have enough citra hops for what we wanted to do.  I had to make a judgement call on the fly and decided to pick up a couple of ounces of chinook hops.  Was that ever t...