Brewing a Noble Hopped Pilsner, Sending my beer to the Jamil Show, IPA Day, UNTAPPD.

Goes down too easy

If you know me then it's no secret that Sam Adams Noble Pils is my most favorite of all of their beers.  (I love their Oktoberfest as well.  But Noble Pils takes the crown)  I have been gearing up to do a Pilsner for a while now.  And I wanted to make sure it was about as simple as you can get.  So I went all out and made up a recipe using all Pilsner, a touch of Carapils and tons of Noble Saaz, Tettnang and Hallertau.  The result is the "Noble Donkey Pils." (check it out here)  I kept thinking about the movie Shrek when I heard the word "noble" since donkey always wanted to be a "noble steed" in the movie even though he was just a donkey.  So that's what I'm trying for.  A good homebrewed beer that wants to be as great as the commercial counterpart.

Out with the DMS!

The brew day went great.  I mash hopped again because I wanted to try it on one of my own recipes.  Probably did very little to nothing to the beer.  I think it added 2 IBUs or something ridiculous like that.  But I love Saaz and that hop does magic to beer so why not.  Ended up doing a solid 90 minute boil to get rid of DMS and chilled the wort overnight to get it down to 50 degrees before pitching a healthy amount of yeast.  It has been bubbling away since last Wednesday.  I'm going to give this beer a solid two weeks in the primary to make sure it does the job.  Then give it a rest at room temp for a day, keg it and start lagering.  I am going to ultimately wait one month before this beer makes it to the glass.  I want it to be clear, and ready.  It's best to forget about it for a while once it hits the keg.
Last week I sent my beer to the Brewing Network to have my American Garage Amber Ale (recipe here) reviewed and tasted by Jamil and Tasty.  I'm a little worried about the beer since it's going all the way to California and it's my first time shipping.  I read up on what to do and even listened to a Brew Strong episode on competition brewing to make sure I packed the box to the exact specifications needed.  I even added a printed recipe and BJCP labels to my bottles as if they were going out for a competition.  Just to make extra sure I was treating it with seriousness and providing the best information I could about my beer.  It's a simple beer but it has some great flavor and just the right amount of hop flavor (in my opinion.)  I have brewed it twice now and I'm most likely going to keep making it until the world is depleted of grain and hops!  We shall see if my beer actually makes it on the show.  If it does I'll probably do a dance like this.

Celebrating IPA Day at the Library

August 1st was International IPA Day.  My buddy Vinie and I went down to the local pub called "The Library" which has 40 taps of craft beer on the ready.  It used to be kind of a dive with awful bathrooms but they just renovated the place and added the bay next door.  So now it's twice as big and they have new clean bathrooms.  Plus, how cool is it to tell your wife you went to "The Library" when you were actually out having a few beers?  Pretty cool if you ask me.  In honor of IPA day (and in honor of having a DD) I went with the IPA flight.  I had quite a few great beers that night.  Honorable mentions being the Weyerbacher Last Chance IPA, Green Flash's Citra Session, and the Goose Island "The Illinios."  All were tasty and went down too easy.  One of the beers, Left Coast's Hop Juice must have been a bad keg or was just not a good batch.  Because it tasted like stale butterscotch and had little to no actual hop flavor.  (A bit of aroma, but still, very surprising it was not present in the beer taste itself.)  I will definitely have to give it another try sometime because I was very underwhelmed by that keg of it anyway.  I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt for sure though.
My last little note for today is that I registered my home "brewery" on UNTAPPD.  If you don't know what this app is you must be living under a rock.  Probably the best phone app for beer since man discovered fire.  (If that makes any sense whatsoever...check their website here!)   I have added a link to my brewery "Browar Harvat" on the right hand side of my blog.  So at any time you can log a beer there (if you are lucky enough to try my beer...or unfortunate enough depending on how you feel about my beer) or just see how others are enjoying/hating it.  Thanks for reading.  I'll be back again with more soon.  This week at some point I'll be brewing an ESB using New Zealand Motueka.  It's going to be weird, and awesome.