Brew Day

Nothing makes me want to brew beer like
a spring-like 48 degree day in the middle of winter, cheers!

The weather was so balmy last week that I went fishing twice and brewed beer. The crazy thing is I haven't even thought about skiing since it hasn't snowed in 2 weeks. Perfect weather for brewing. I ordered a bunch of hops and specialty malts from Austinhomebrew.com and picked up a 55 lb sack of base malt at Planet Natural. So now I have the ingredients for 5 batches of beer. I have 5 new recipes I'm trying out. These beers or some iteration of the style will be on rotation in our taproom at times, and we will also develop some to be our flagship brands. They include in no particular order: Scotch ale, Stout, Pale and IPA.
                      

Here's 10 gallons of a Belgian White beer, or "Witbier." I am going to dry hop 5 gallons with Galaxy hop and in the other 5 gallons I'm going to add some Hibiscus herbal tea at the dryhop stage. 5 gallons of Galaxy Dryhopped Wit and a 5'er of Hibiscus Wit. We'll see if one tastes better than the other. I really like Witbiers. They are very refreshing in the summer, and still satisfying during the colder months. We will have some sort of wheat beer on rotation whether it is a Hefeweizen, American wheat, Witbier, or Saison.

One thing I look forward to is having a lot of rotating beers. It will enable us to determine what our fanbase likes the most. After a while we will get a good idea of the palate of our fans and thereby able to accommodate your desires more fully.

After the brew day was done, I even had enough
time to take the dogs on their daily walk. It was a
beautiful evening for a walk. Did I mention that
Livingston has some amazing sunsets?

Guest Brew Day at Fat Jack's in Laurel.

This weekend we went over to Laurel to hang out on a brew day and brew with Fat Jack's head brewer and manager Mike Soleburg. Mike was really gracious to let us come over and get involved with his brew day. Mike was making their Oatmeal Stout.

In this picture to the right, Mike is loading grain into the mill hopper. It falls down through the grinder, gets ground into coarse flour for all practical purposes, and the auger pumps it up a tube into the mash tun (pictured below.)

You can see the grain and water being pumped down into the tun near the top of the manhole. Once the grain is in the mash tun it is mixed with water at 185 degrees and the result is a mash that sits for 1 hour at 153 degrees.






After soaking for an hour, the "sweet wort" (it's called) is drained off the grain into the boil kettle (below.) There it is boiled for 90 minutes, hops are added then it is whirl-pooled for approximately 20 minutes at the end which helps clarify the beer.









There were lots of chocolate and coffee aromas coming from the boil kettle. Mike makes a great Oatmeal Stout, and this one might even be better since I helped with the mashing in. Oh, and I helped dump the hops in too.

After the hot wort is finished whirl-pooling, it is transferred through a heat exchanger (to cool it to room temp) then into a fermenter. Yeast is pitched into the fermentor as it is filling up with stouty-goodness. All we have to do now is put the airlock on the fermentor, wait two weeks and blammo! Stouty-goodness coming out of the taps.

I really would like to thank Mike and Steve Soleburg for letting me come over and guest brew on their system. It was a lot of fun, learned a lot, made some friends and got to see a great beer being made in the processs.

Goldenstein "Lifer" Membership and Brewmaster Mug Club

Goldenstein "Lifer" Memberships are like a lifetime season pass to the brewery, with 3 free pints a month, plus a bunch of other good stuff. 

$900                                            $250    

Goldenstein Lifer Membership              Brewmaster Mug Club

Brewmaster mug club memberships provide you with $1 off every pint for LIFE!

What are you waiting for? The Goldenstein goes up to $1000 in Feburary. The Mug Club goes up $50 bucks to $300.  Look at it as a membership to a BEER gym. You want to work out your malty biceps don't you? Do some hop laps? You're going to be down there drinking beer anyway. Why not have a membership to the beer gym?

Go to www.katabaticbrewing.goodsie.com or HERE!