Recent content by petercarrjones

The third annual Sam Adams/DC Homebrewers Competition provides an opportunity for amateur brewers to test their skills against other homebrewers in the area, as well as show their beer off to the public. The final competition, open to the public will be held on April 26 at Meridian Pint. Sam...

In for this!

My 2012 version was a split batch of sorts. We mashed with some roasted acorn squash, we then fermented half inside a pumpkin(!) and half in glass- both used Belgian Leuven Yeast (WY3538). The pumpkin half became our fall pumpkin beer, which we bottled half with spices, half without. The clean...

Brewed this last weekend for the 3rd consecutive year, but did change things up a bit. We roasted 3 pounds of acorn squash and put it in the mash. Then we boiled as normal. 2 gallons went into the fermenter, 2.5 gallons went into a pumpkin! So we'll have a pumpkin beer party in October, but 2...

Ooooh, love the idea of a Belgian yeast.

In!

Yes!

Yeah!!

A lot of "warm" to this winter warmer!

Just bottled last night. Had a little more volume of beer and felt the spicing wasn't quite up to where we wanted it from last year. Our spice tea: 1.5 tbl ginger powder 2 cinnamon sticks 2 vanilla beans- split 2 tbl orange peel 1 tsp all spice 3/4 cup priming sugar Brought to boil, steeped...

Due to the high gravity and spices, it definitely gets better with age. It's still darn good after only a month or so of conditioning, so I think your keg should be tasty by early Jan. The bottles will keep getting better/smoother.

Thanks for the suggestions on smoking. After doing some more googling I found episodes on smoked beer at the Jamil Show and better brewing to be useful as to process. Apache, thanks for the recipe advice. Sounds like I'm going with a maltier style on this one.

I was thinking of turning a California Common kit into a smoked Rauchbier-like CC. A) Will the hop character and bitterness be completely off-base with the smoke? B) Any suggestions on how to smoke the malt? I was going to use an electric stovetop smoker and smoke 1.5 lBs of Cara 60 over...

I'm thinking of a similar recipe using smoked specialty grains and a CA Common kit. How did this turn out?

How would wood aging affect a Rauchbier? I'm specifically planning a sort of modified rauchbier using a Cali common as the base.