Cream Ale, Brewing Oktoberfest, FATHEAD, Lauter Tun and Extra Special Bill

My Cream Ale, Looking Good!

First things first.  Check out how cool my Cream Ale looks.  It's clear and tastes awesome!  I think when I enter this baby in some competitions soon it will be a really great example of the style and should do well.  I had my friend/coworker Chad Rozniecki taste it last week and he gave it high marks.  He even filled out a BJCP sheet for it and rated it for me.  Now does one opinion mean it's the be all end all of cream ales?  No.  But it makes me amped about brewing because I am really happy with this beer and others are noticing it's good too.

Oktoberfest!

This last week/weekend was great.  A lot happened and I brewed two beers.  After taking the Noble Pils off of the yeast and kegging it, I brewed up an Oktoberfest and pitched it right on top of the yeast cake from the Pilsner.  It is now taking off at an alarming rate.  I have no doubts it will be a successful fermentation.  The yeast is really going to town.  The recipe I used was straight from Brewing Classic Styles and can be seen here.  It's fairly simple, but will work out just great for a very easy drinking Oktoberfest lager.  As you can see in the pictures it was a very nice clear amber coming out of the mash tun.  Oktoberfest is pretty much the beer style that made me want to brew in the first place.  And I have yet to even make one that wasn't a "mocktoberfest" ale.  Now that I have temperature control and the ability to work with plenty of lager yeast I'm able to make a true Oktoberfest.  I'm really looking forward to the results.  One of my favorite beers to enjoy in the fall is Sam Adam's Octoberfest.  Which I originally started drinking during my college years and it is probably the beer that broke me through from plain old domestic beer and into the craft beer foray.  So once this beer is ready it will be really special to me.  I can't wait to have it on tap in my basement for a Husker game.  After finishing the Oktoberfest I realized I had the whole day off Saturday and my wife wouldn't be home until later that night.  So I decided to brew a second beer.  I made a beer called "Extra Special Bill."  It can be seen here.  I used plenty of Maris and EKGs to give it English flavor and I'm hoping that the late hopping additions will give it a nice hop aroma.  I'm a huge fan of Empyrean's "Luna Sea" ESB and it says that they use a little bit of biscuit malt in their ESB.  So I decided to add some to mine and see how it turned out.

US Open Gold Winner

Lets back up a little bit and talk about last Thursday.  My friend Vinie and I went to Nebraska Brewing Company to enjoy the release of the new Saison from the Wort Transformation Competition.  (Which was mighty tasty I might add)  After having a couple of beers and dinner, I decided to pick up a bottle of Fathead to save for a bottle share in the near future.  I wanted to get a bottle from this batch because they won the 2013 US Open Beer Championship in the "Barleywine" category with it.  So it must be pretty awesome!  I can't wait to enjoy it.  (Check out the US Open Website here to see what I'm talking
about)  Thanks to Master Chef Chad Waters for his suggestion.   I have had almost every different barrel aged beer that NBC makes.  But have not yet had the opportunity to drink Fathead.  I have a feeling sharing this is the best way to go because of the high ABV.  Although I love barrel aged Hop God and that's 10% so maybe I could take care of this beer on my own.  I'd probably rather share it though so I don't end up taking a nap right afterwards.
Warp back to Friday (I'm taking you guys on a time travel adventure this week) and this may have been one of the best beer weekends I have had in a while.  Not only are my beers maturing in the kegerator to the point where I'm really excited to enter them in the next few competitions.  But for whatever reason, this weekend involved all sorts of beer goodness that began with my shift on Friday at Lauter Tun.  Now I just started working at Lauter Tun as a Barback/Bartender in Training.  I have plenty of knowledge in the beer area, and I'm actually very happy and proud of the bar because they have an excellent tap selection which can all be enjoyed from the proper beer glassware!  But I'm not the most knowledgeable person as of yet on all of the mixed drinks.  I'm learning them and I can make a killer Old Fashioned or Moscow Mule.  Start throwing some crazy named drinks at me though and I'll be asking for backup!  Check out the Lauter Tun website here.  If you're in Omaha and want to check out a great craft beer bar.  This is my usual watering hole.

Heady Topper

Kevin who works with me there brought in a bottle of Pliny The Elder the other day, which was something I haven't enjoyed since I was in Oregon two years ago.  So that was a treat.  Then a regular brings in some Heady Topper that night too.  I could tell it was going to be a good weekend.

Zombie Dust

During the brew day the next day my friend Kyle hooked me up with some Zombie Dust and some G'Night from Oskar Blues.  I was officially marking my calendar so this day would be remembered throughout history.  Well maybe that's a bit overboard.  But it was definitely shaping up to be a good weekend.
Last night I watched Breaking Bad with the wife and enjoyed a couple brews.  I picked up some Paulaner Oktoberfest/Marzen to get myself psyched for my Oktoberfest that was fermenting right next door in my office.  I also drank some of my Dusseldorf Altbier and enjoyed how much the beer had progressed during lagering.  It has really cleared up and has a great malty taste now.  I can't wait to enter it in the Nebraska State Fair this week.  I'll let everyone know how that goes and any results.  As of last weekend I received a call about the Sioux Falls Empire Fair and that my Oatmeal Stout was in the top 16 entries.  I haven't heard anything other than that.  Once I see a full list I'll post it up and see how everything else faired.....at the fair.  Yeah.  Alright have a great week everyone.  Thanks for reading.

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.