6 Guys Brewing

We have been brewing 5 gallon batches pretty extensively for the last couple of years.  We will occasionally brew 10g batches when the need arises, and will be moving toward 10g batches now that the brewery is mostly complete.   Pretty much any kit you can mail order is a 5g batch, and there is certainly nothing wrong with them, except for the fact that they don’t last…

I recently brewed a 5g batch of a Black IPA that was a kit from http://austinhomebrew.com, and while the kit wasn’t exactly what I was looking for (more on that in another post), it was super delicious.  I’ve been super busy with home renovations recently, which has prevented me from brewing too much, but I have 5 excellent friends, who helped me out by putting the beer in the keg when it was ready, and “storing it for me.”  Of course, a couple of pints had to be sampled during this storage, probably to the tune of 1/2 a gallon.  My 5g batch was 4.5g before I even got to take it home.

A few weeks later, a friend is throwing a party, and I am told to bring beer.  My choices are my homebrew or some off the shelf thing.  I like to think my homebrew is tasty, so I take that.  It’s a hit.  The 1/2g I took over on Friday night to sample turns into 2 more growler’s worth on Sunday when we have a smaller get together.  My 5g is now down to 3g.  Still plenty of beer left, right?

Whenever anyone comes over, I give them a pint of my homebrew.  Again, I’m happy with it, and want to show that home brewed beers can taste as good as commercial beers.  For every pint I give my friends, I need to partake in one as well.  If I have only 5 friends come over, I have gone through yet another gallon.  I like to think I have more than 5 friends, and those friends will like my beer enough to drink more than one pint, so we’ll call it 2g for friend visits.

This leaves me with 1g of beer for myself, to drink with dinner, or after mowing the lawn, or whenever I want to enjoy a homebrew.  I usually use imperial pint glasses, which means I have 8 glasses of beer to enjoy.  Those 8 glasses spaced out over 6 weeks is insignificant, though each one is incredibly enjoyable, I just wish I had more.

Keep in mind, this problem only exists for the ones you like.  I’ve brewed some beers that I can’t give away to people, and it just sits, and sits, and sits.  The 5g batch feels like an entire 1/2 keg and something you can never get through.  Come to think of it, maybe the 5g batch isn’t such a bad choice.

It was last evening that we had the Homebrewer’s of Rochester meeting, and it was the last chance to sample the Livonian IPA, that Travis had saved 1/2 the growler of for the meeting.  I was thankfully at this meeting, and it was one of the first beers the group got to sample.  All I can say about this beer is that it’ll be missed.  It was an off the cuff recipe that has really come into its own in the last 2 weeks.  The citrus flavor is exactly what I look for in an IPA, but it was also well balanced.  While many IPAs tend to be bitter for the sake of being bitter, the Livonian IPA was not.  There was no doubt it was an IPA, but boy was it good.  If we ever make it to be any sort of commercial brewery, this will be on our short list recipes.  I’m not sure if the homegrown hops did it, the water, or just dumb luck, but there is one thing for sure, the only thing we’re complaining about is that it’s gone.

We’re going to take you back a couple weeks now to the hop harvest.  In the Spring of 2008, Jason planted four hop plants, one Cascade, one Magnum, one Golding and one Willamette.  The autumn 2008 harvest yielded almost no hops, as was expected in the first year.  The summer of 2009 though, yielded a competely different result, for two of the plants anyway.  The Golding and the Magnum were still a weak yield, which isn’t too surprising, but the Cascade and Willamette yielded a bountiful number of hops for brewing beer.  Below are some pictures from the harvest day.

One of the hop plants we harvested.  In another year, it will have some siblings.

Bill, the hand model, holding some crushed cascade hops.  You can almost smell the sweet citrus in the air.

A nice full basket of hops.  These have since been dried and put into beer.  Once dried, they weigh about 1/10th of their ‘wet’ weight.  This means that you need about 2 1/2 cups of dryed whole hops to get an one once.  Additionally, due to lower surface area than pellets, you need about 20% more whole leaf hops than pellets for the same recipe.

 The hops gathered from this session were used in the Livonian IPA, which is due to be kegged in the next couple of days.  Jason is planning to plant another 16 plants in the spring, so he’ll have 6 of each plant.  That will give us more than enough hops to do several batches.  The next trick will be figuring out the most economic way to pellitize the hops, as adding 6-8oz of whole leaf hops to a brew tends to clog things up, and there aren’t enough grain bags in the world when you decided to add hops every 10 minutes.

We currently have 2 beers fermenting. We don’t have any pictures of them brewing, which is silly, seeing how they were both relatively original recipes.

The Livonian IPA is a very original recipe, brewed with hopes grown in Livonia, NY (South Livonia, really, but who’s keeping track), by a good friend of ours. We ended up creating an IPA with 6 1/2 oz of whole leaf Cascade and Willamete hops. That one is currently sitting in the secondary fermenter, waiting to be kegged. I’m not sure if it will be what I wanted though, as the original gravity was a little low.

The 2nd one we currently have fermenting is the pumpkin ale. That one also had a low original gravity, but spent the first 3-4 days of fermenting going nuts (we ended up having to put a blow off on it). It looks good now, though it’ll be a week or 2 before get around to kegging it. Hopefully in time for the Halloween party, though we need to finish up the Honey Amber first.

Recipe: Pumpkin Spice Ale