Now that I'm actually awake and coherent, I'll try to better describe the day.
I got up early and was less than awake to be prepping for a full on brew day so early. We packed up the truck with 1/2g of Apfelwine, 1/2g Stout, 1/2g Dunkelwiezen, and a six pack of fruited Sorachi Saison. We stopped for ice and it took literally 20 minutes for someone to make me a fricking breakfast bagel sandwich at the store/eatery.
By the time I had my sammy in hand - we're running 22 minutes late and screaming at all the saturday morning nutjobs driving 45 miles on the highway down to 98EXL's house. Damn - dude lives in a very nice neightborhood and has a beautiful place to hang out.
We did a quick propane run, then hung around looking at 98's hop garden until flytact came with the ingredients. I can't wait to see how the hops are going to be by next summer, because the soil was great and it was a nice little garden out in the woods. We would later light a small campfire in the garden and hang out until 10:00pm.
Fly came with the ingredients, but had to run off to do something else and told us to mash him in a batch until he got back. We fired off 2 Belgian Wit's based on the Naked City White Heat and Draconianhand's Devil's Milk Recipe. I say 'based' because we would later screw it all up.
White Heat boiled up first due to a boiler issue on the Devil's Milk. We were pretty much done with our 60 minute boil by the time the second one finally got up to a boiling point. I measured out the spices beforehand and put the combined spices into a bag to put in at the ~10 minute mark. I had a bunch of 'base bags' which held the bulk of the spice additions while I was making out the smaller 'batch bags.' Right around the end of the boil, I found the batch bag for White Heat and wondered why it didn't make it in. Then I looked in the kettle and saw orange peel floating, so I had some questions about how it got in there - turns out my roommate put ALL the orange peel from the base bag instead of the batch bag of spices. So we faked in and tossed random spices in around 0 minutes just to make it work. At some point or another, due to the lack or orange peel - people randomly walked over to Devil's Milk and put stuff in it. No way to tell how much of what made it in. Then I realized that we scaled it to 10g from the original recipe - but when they asked about hop additions, I used the 5g hop amount - so I'll call that one 'Half Wit' although I think the group decided to call it 'Dimwit.'
At that point we realized we were short on pils and wheat to make more Wit (needed 10 more gallons for people in attendance) but we did have a ton of extra stuff lying around (like 9# maris, 3.5# flaked oat, 5# flaked wheat, 1# belgian candy sugar, and a few other things). We decided to just toss it all in and make a Saison.
Nobody knows how much of what actually made it into FrankenSaison, but my above estimate should be 'close.' 98EXL's mash tun Brewmometer was kinda F-ed up, so it read 140 the whole mash, so we don't know what the ACTUAL temp was. Then we had trouble fitting the sparge water into the cooler so had to multi-sparge. I forgot to mention - some of the sparge water was leftover 2nd runnings from the Devil's Milk - didn't want to waste any good sugars. Part of the boil for FrankenSaison even included the strained leftover from the White Heat that didn't fit in anyone's fermenters.
It tasted good AND funky (even without belgian yeast) from the Hydro sample we took. We shall see how it turns out, but likely the best beer ever made and we'll never duplicate it.
This morning - my 'super extra orange' White Heat is blowing off and I needed to hook up the tube to it. I put a 3/8" tube over the airlock on FrankenSaison just in case it decided to blow up while I'm out at the HB store today.
All in all a great time. Great brews from everyone!
My fav's of the day where clap's Oatmeal Stout and fly's Maibock.