FOOLCiRCLE

It’s been a while, how have you been? Great, I’m glad you’re still thirsty for more homebrew.

Today I brewed what was originally labeled as FC Hoppy IPA, which I later mentally dubbed the Hailstorm IPA, but in all honesty it’s the Son of the Stick-Icky IPA. I had written this recipe back in May when I had ordered a bunch of ingredients. I like to write maybe six recipes at a time and then order ingredients accordingly versus ordering a bunch of random stuff and basing my recipes from what’s available. So, this one was just labeled as FC Hoppy IPA, it was roughly based off of the Fool Circle 10th Anniversary Ale Sticky-Icky DIPA. I say roughly because the base malt is slightly different and the hop additions are slightly different, same volume of base malt, and almost the same volume of hops, but with half the dry hops, which is still a half pound.

Anyway, the brew day went alright. It started a little slow, I had run out of coffee! So after a coffee run, I had to run back out to the grocery store to pick an additional ingredient up for the brew day. After the running around and getting the brew area cleaned up I probably started about 11:30AM. No major mishaps, which is great. It was the first brew day with the new basement door installed, which was nice, no more annoying screen door in the way. I did blow a hose on my water filter which was kind of crazy. In the middle of the hose it just blew apart, where there appeared to be no stress, no wear, no nothing, but the tubing was about twice as thin as it should have been, weird. It wasn’t a big deal, I had some extra tubing available and replaced it. About halfway through the brew day the sky started to get much darker, and knowing there was a 50% chance of rain I decided to put up my rain fly, which is essentially a blue tarp held up by bungee cords. It actually worked really well this time; no gaps, no puddles, no billowing. Though, it wasn’t just rain. Where I was we received rain, hail, and ice, it was quite loud but nice and dry and pretty warm from all the additional heat from the steam.

I also, finally worked on the SAW Pale Ale some. It really should have been transferred to kegs like, oh, say, a month or so ago. But, I’ve been slacking hard on the homebrew front, and today I actually transferred it to a third carboy. I was originally going to keg it today,  but forgot I wanted to try and fine the beer with gelatin which takes a couple days. I’ve never used it before, but it is what was available on the fly, so we’ll see. I followed some of the basic techniques on line: boil a cup of water, cool close to room temp, add a TBSP of gelatin, let it bloom, shake/stir, add to carboy, add beer, wait a few days to clear. Hopefully it’ll work. The beer was “clear enough”, but I was hoping it’d be clearer, plus I wanted to experiment with the technique anyway. If it really drops it clear I may use it more often, especially with heavily dry hopped beers which almost always seem to have more haze. After all the brew day action, and transfer fun, and clean up what nots the brew day wrapped a little after 8:00PM, a little long, but not too bad.

So as of now there is ten gallons of Sticky Jr waiting to begin fermentation in my upstairs, too cold during this time of the year in the basement. Hopefully by tomorrow morning it’ll be bubbling away and then ready to transfer in about two weeks, drop a quarter pound of dry hops in each carboy, and then keg (or possibly gelatin and then keg) shortly after. It really shouldn’t be up in the rotation to be put on tap, but I’m a sucker for fresh hoppy beers, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see this beer sooner than later. On tap now is the second keg of CA Red from this summer, mellowed out some in the hop realm but still tasty taste, the Chocolate American Brown, good but I now believe I’ll stick with Cocoa Nibs, and the Sage and Black Peppercorn Saison, tasty but sweeter than it should be. Theoretically more on those three later this week.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Homebrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.