End Of Silence Has A Tasting Room In My Garage...

It has been a few years in the making, some paint here, some glasses there, updating the keezer, etc, etc, but the bar is pretty much done.  I really enjoy the look and feel of it, and so does my wife.  The wood on the wall, light gray paint, bright purple accents, and white trim really pops.  The way that it turned out really makes me hopeful to translate it over to the brewery tasting room as well.  Just a few things that we want to do to finish it up, but those will have to wait until we have the funds for them.  We want to swap out the ugly carpet for vinyl flooring.  It will make it much easier to clean up spills, and finish off the look nicely.  We also want to knock out the wall that leads to the deck and put in a slider door.  We need some better lighting which we are working on at the moment.  We also want to make the window bigger so we can look out at the hops against the fence and watch the kids play in their area just outside that wall.  The chairs I have in there are super comfortable, but extremely ugly, so we want to get some fabric to cover them with.

Brewery Trial Recipe - IPA 2.0

The beauty and difficulty of working with yeast is that some of the strains out there have the ability to transform the aromatics of the hops into something different than what you were expecting.  This can create amazing new flavors and aromas from the hops than what you were expecting, but it also makes it difficult to put together a hop bill when looking for a specific flavor or aroma.  I tried shifting up my Columbus to try to get some resin in the profile compared to the last batch, and the Chinook and Columbus are just putting out more fruit.  It makes for a wonderful beer, very aromatic and juicy, but it is lacking a little bit of that PNW oomph I want in there.  I don't want much, just a little pine and dankness to take me out of the fruit juice arena a little more.  It is also difficult to get any bitterness to shine through.  The yeast is really impacting the bitterness and making it hard to get a snap on the finish.  Again, it tastes great, but it just needs a touch more bitterness to clarify, yes, this is indeed an IPA.  I really don't want this beer to be a traditional PNW IPA with lots of cattiness and citrus with a walloping bitterness.  I want it to be bold and aromatic with a restrained bitterness, lots of juicy fruits, with a subtle resin and pine.  A marriage of the new juicy East Coast IPAs and the traditional PNW IPA.  Still need to adjust up the Columbus and Chinook with a higher IBU and see how it goes.  Also need to get the ABV back down to 7.0%.  Other than that, this IPA is pretty much spot on.

Brewery Trial Recipe: Saison 2.0

For the first iteration of the Session Saison for the brewery, I got pretty close to what I wanted.  It needed to dry out a little more to hit that 4.5% ABV I wanted.  I upped the Vienna and Sugar and backed off a touch on the Flaked Oats and Base Malt.  The dry hopped version and spiced version were both good beers, but a blend of the two really took it up a notch, so on this rendition I spiced the whole thing in the kettle, and then dry hopped the entire batch.  I got a little too much herbal from the first rendition, so I leaned a little more on the Meridian in this batch than the last one.  I also upped the IBUs a bit as well since the yeast seams to down play the bitterness quite a bit.  For fermentation on this batch I did a side by side with the yeast strain that is quickly standing out as the forerunner as the house yeast, and that same strain blended with another less attenuative and earthy strain.  This is the same blend that the first batch got, but instead of staggered pitches they were co-pitched.  I also cranked up the temp a few degrees to really push the esters.  So far the first pours from the kegs are very promising.