First non-kit BIAB brews

[auburntsts]

So I just tried my first 2 brews that I did by recipe alone vs a kit with grain purchased from my LBHS and milled by me at home: Beirmuncher's Centennial Blonde and Yooper's Oatmeal Stout.

The Blonde is decent (admittedly not my favorite style--brewed it for SWMBO) but I think could use another week of conditioning. The Stout- whoa momma! It's fantastic!!!! I wish I was kegging instead of bottling and could try it on beer gas.

 

[PrrCabin]

Well done!

Cabin

 

[Leezer]

That’s great! Yoopers Oatmeal Stout was one of my first biab and it’s still one of my favorites, just bottled I think my 4th batch.

 

[Hwk-I-St8]

Congrats! It's a great feeling to do that. Just wait until you brew your own recipe and you're looking forward to every glass. That's a magical thing.

I just cold crashed a variant of the Centennial Blonde last night and Yooper's Oatmeal Stout is on my list to brew.

 

[auburntsts]

Congrats! It's a great feeling to do that. Just wait until you brew your own recipe and you're looking forward to every glass. That's a magical thing.

I just cold crashed a variant of the Centennial Blonde last night and Yooper's Oatmeal Stout is on my list to brew.

Hopefully I'll get there one day! I've got Beirmuncher's Octoberfest Ale in the fermenter right now and I have high hopes for it as I really like the Marzen/Octoberfest style and would like to have that available to drink all the time. My next step is to ramp up to 5 gal batches and switch to kegging, but that's on hold as we're moving this summer and I want to wait and see what our new digs will be before committing to new equipment.

 

[Hwk-I-St8]

Hopefully I'll get there one day! I've got Beirmuncher's Octoberfest Ale in the fermenter right now and I have high hopes for it as I really like the Marzen/Octoberfest style and would like to have that available to drink all the time. My next step is to ramp up to 5 gal batches and switch to kegging, but that's on hold as we're moving this summer and I want to wait and see what our new digs will be before committing to new equipment.

Kegging is huge. I think the beer is better, it's much easier, and you can control the carbonation more precisely. I brewed extract beers in the 90s and bottled. Just got back into brewing about a year ago and I went straight to all grain using my own recipes. Well, I say "my own recipes", but the line is blurry. I've read through a boatload of recipes starting months before I brewed my first batch and, for the ones I've brewed, they're really an amalgomation of all the recipes I've read.

I read recipes, look up the ingredients (carapils, for example) see what it brings to the recipe. My first beer was a NEIPA so I researched as much as I could about how to get the juicy flavors and great mouthfeel. After a ton of reading, you start to see the common denominators...what things to a vast majority agree on...and I incorporated them into my recipe. I've since brewed about a dozen NEIPAs and tweaked the recipe into something that's really, really good (the first batch was very tasty and really impressed my friends).

I'd really like to get one of those small torpedo kegs and brew some small batch stuff to speed up the experimentation process.