Saturday, November 23, 2013

A Brew Day

The time has come to brew my Belgian Tripel again. This was my first beer, and that batch is *still* the best beer I've ever made.  Part of me wants to believe that's true, but it can't have been that good.  I mean, c'mon... really?  The story: I brewed it on Dan's electric RIMS system (possibly the 2nd beer ever made on that system?) I bottled it, and started drinking it a week later.  3 *months* later I tried some and it was epic, but I was down to a 6-pack.  So it's a classic story of beginner's luck / rookie mistakes / Murphy's law.  Now it's Jam-Cake Syndrome: now matter how good you make it, it will never be as good as grandma's was in your memory.


It's lovely to see a good boil.  I'm confident that this batch will be awesome.  (I shall post the recipe in a future post.  ...shh, it's a stock Northern Brewer recipe...)

While we were at it, we transferred a cider from The Bucket of Truth.  It's been in primary for more than a year.  It's delicious.  Now it's on oak.


The curious thing is that something so subtlely good can come from a vessel that looks so wrong.  We expected failure, but it tasted so good that we almost just put the Tripel into the bucket.  


To finish off the day we went to Sean's and bottled 10 gallons of gluten-free beer.  It went really fast with 4 people, and it tastes pretty good.


Then we played boardgames, drank meticulously prepared Chemex pour-over coffee, and ate soy chorizo tacos from Corazon.  

Oh, and Dan's going to brew another batch of the Belgian tomorrow to put into The Bucket of Truth.  The Truth will set us all free.

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