My first year was very successful, it’s been just about a year after I started with this idea and I am still obsessed with beer and homebrew.  I can’t seem to move on from this first years lesson which is fine by me.  I won’t be updating this blog any more but I will keep the contents of this blog here so you can read through my journey if you are so inclined.

I was introduced to this brewery at German bar and restaurant on South Street in Philadelphia.  Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the bar but had a great time there and hope to make it back at some point.  They had a Bavarian Barbarian (LOVE that name) beer on top and it was quite good.  They are based in Williamsport, PA and have very limited distribution at this point but luckily my wife travels for work and goes up to Williamsport on a regular basis.    On her last trip I asked her to pick me up a few bottles and she brought me back their Stout and their Hammerin Ale.

The Hammerin Ale is the first beer they produced at the brewery.  Beer Advocate classifies this beer as an American Amber or Red Ale.

The beer pours a really nice amber color with an impressive head and it takes awhile to dissipate.   It is slightly cloudy but they advertise it as an unfiltered beer so that is to be expected.

The aroma is pretty mild.  You can smell the malt and hops but it’s not a very strong smell.

I have seen some so-so reviews of this beer and since the aroma didn’t blow me away I din’t have very high expectations but I was pleasantly surprised.  I thought the beer was carbonated well with a nice mouthfeel.  It’s got a great malt flavor with some hop bitterness and some fruity flavors coming through.

They describe this beer as a perfect introduction for people to craft beer and I would agree.  It’s balanced and nicely flavored and I enjoyed drinking it.

It’s been a very busy year of beer so far and I still have 5 more months to go. My year of Beer started on my Birthday which is August 30th and it goes until my next birthday.  I have been pretty lax in updating my goals page but I finally spent some time this evening updating the list of beers that I have tried so far.  My goal is to try 200 different beers during my year of beer and so far I have had 122 of them.  What I think is even more impressive is that most of the beer I have had had has been really good.

You can read through my current list by going to My Goals Page.  After you read through it, I would love to get your feedback on what you think of my list so far.  More importantly, I would love to get your opinion on what craft beer I should try before my Year of Beer is out.  Just post your feedback in the comments below.

The Bruery is famous for their sour beers, I believe that is all they make but I am not certain.  This is only the third sour beer I have ever had and to tell you the truth, before I started my Year of Beer I had no idea they even existed.  The first one I had was a Flemish Sour at Monk’s cafe in Philadelphia.  It’s made exclusively for them in Belgium.  To my palette, that beer was VERY sour and overwhelming for someone that had never tried a sour beer.  I didn’t hate it but I also couldn’t finish it.  I was told that sour beers are an acquired taste so I thought I would give this one a try.

The Bruery is located in Orange County, California.  They only sell their beer in kegs or large 750 ml bottles, they don’t have a bottling line for small bottles.   The Hottenroth is a Berliner Weisse which is a Belgian Style Sour Wheat Ale.  The beer is named after the owner’s grandparents, Fred and Sarah Hottenroth.

It’s color is a very pale straw and it’s got a little bit of a haze.  It is a very carbonated beer.  I got an okay head but it dissipated very quickly.  I am told that the reason for the poor head retention is the high acidity and low protein count.

It’s got a very nice aroma.  It’s not super strong but it’s enough that you know what you are about to get.  It smells sour with hints of lemon and other citrus.

The taste matches the aroma.  It’s got a really nice sour taste to it with some hints of lemon.  There is something else in the flavor that I am tasting but can’t identify.  The carbonation comes through on the taste and it has a very dry finish.  I had it plain, they recommend trying it with raspberry or woodruff syrup to balance out the sourness.

All in all, I think this was a much better introduction to sour beers than the Flemish sour I had a Monks.  It’s not overpowering and is very refreshing.  I could enjoy this beer on a hot day while doing some yard work.  It’s a good session beer at a very low 3.1% ABV.

I don’t have any home brew stores in my immediate area, the closest one is an hour away.  There are 3 that I know of, all an hour away.  I am not complaining, I don’t mind the drive and the stores are good but I don’t always have the time to make that trip for supplies.  When I can’t make that trip, and I am smart enough to think ahead, I order whatever I need online.

Over the last few months, I have written about a new home brew shop based in Brooklyn New York called the Brooklyn Brew Shop.  I thought it was a pretty interesting concept, while most home brew shops are selling bigger and more expensive equipment, Brooklyn Brew Shop keeps it simple.  They only sell all-grain kits and they specialize in kits that you can brew in a small New York apartment.    They sell kits for making 1 gallon batches as well as 5 gallon batches if you prefer to make something more typical.  As I blogged about a few weeks back, I bought a Black and Tan kit, that comes with two brewing kits plus ingredients to make a dry stout and an ESB.

I received my kits a few weeks back and have already brewed my first beer.  I brewed the dry stout and it was the first all-grain beer I ever brewed.  I have wanted to try all-grain brewing for awhile now but I was intimidated.  I have read a lot but it was information overload and it made it seem a lot more complicated than it actually is.   The kit made it easy to brew and because it was only one gallon of beer, I didn’t need any more equipment.  Instead of adding a lauter tun to my pool of equipment, I simply needed a standard kitchen strainer and a 2nd brew pot which I already had.  You can read more about this at my first all-grain homebrew experience.

The point I am trying to make is that there are more advantages to the one gallon kit than just the space, it allowed me to brew an all-grain batch without any additional equipment and with very easy to follow directions.   I also like the idea of being able to brew small batches when I want to experiment with something new.  If I don’t want to spend the money on a normal grain bill for something I am not sure I am going to like, I can make a small test batch.  For a pretty reasonable fee, I received enough equipment to make two 1 gallon batches at at a time and enough ingredients to make my first batch.  I am very happy with my purchase.

I also want to mention that their customer service is fantastic.  My experience with them wasn’t completely without hickups.  When I received the kit, the thermometer was broken and it was missing one of the two rubber stoppers.  I emailed them twice and got no reply.  I was almost ready to give up before I found a contact form on their web site.  I used that and got a reply with an hour.  Apparently, the email I was using was no longer their main email address and it wasn’t forwarding on correctly so they didn’t get my two replies.  Within 2 days I received a package from them that not only had a replacement thermometer and the missing rubber stopper but it also had a hand written thank you note along with ingredients to make another batch of beer.  They went above and beyond to make sure my experience was a good one and they certainly earned a repeat customer out of me.

If you haven’t checked them out yet, I recommend you do so, you can find them at Brooklyn Brew Shop

This past weekend I brewed my first all grain batch.  It was a small batch, just one gallon, but it was a lot of fun.  I have done three extract brews but really wanted to try an all grain batch.   I don’t have a lot of extra money to put into more home brew equipment right now and didn’t know what I wanted to do for a lauter tun.  I also really didn’t understand what it was I was supposed to do with the lauter tun and how to do the sparge.  It all seemed a bit overly complicated to me.

I decided to start out as simply as I could.  I bought a 1 gallon home brew kit with ingredients from the Brooklyn Brew Shop.  They specialize in small kits that can be made in small apartments in NYC.  Because it’s only a one gallon kit, I had everything that I needed to brew it.   I actually bought two kits, I bought the special Black and Tan kit that they have available.  This past weekend, I brewed the dry stout.

With extract brewing, the malt extract is already made and ready to be used.  Most kits come with some specialty grains that you steep in the brew pot to add some flavor to the wort but that isn’t where most of the fermentable sugars come from.  Most of that comes from the malt extract.  If you don’t already know, the wort is the liquid that is created from the water, malt and hops to which you eventually add yeast to turn it into beer.   When you are brewing with all grains, there is no extract and you are creating all of the sugars that the yeast needs to eat, grow and create alcohol.

The first step is to bring your water up to temperature (160 degrees) and add the grains to your brew pot.  This step is called mashing in.  I have heard this term before and read about what it is but I learn much better by actually doing so a lot of things became clear to me this past weekend.  The mash turns into an oatmeal consistency and stays in the brew pot for an hour.  You have to stay on top of it and make sure it stays in the proper temperature range.  I am assuming this is the step where the enzymes are doing their work but I don’t really know.  After an hour, you raise the temperature to 170 degrees.  This is called mashing out.

Here is a pic of my brew pot after this step

The next step is the sparge.  During this step, you pour water through the grains in an attempt to extract all those wonderful flavors and sugars that you created with your mash.  You do this by using a lauter tun.  In this case, the lauter tun was simply a strainer put over another pot.  I poured the contents of the brew pot into the strainer and was surprised at how little liquid there was.  I hope I didn’t do anything wrong as there was only a trickle of wort that poured through the strainer at this point.

The next step was the actual sparge.  In this step I poured 1 gallon of water through the lauter tun in an effort to extract more of the precious flavors and sugars that I worked so hard to create.   You want to end up with 1.2 gallons of wort when you are done because you need to overcompensate to make up for what you will lose during the boil.  Unfortunately, I don’t think I was at the 1.2 gallon mark.  Not sure what I did wrong but I was barely over 1 gallon.  After the sparge, I ran the wort through the grains one more time.

Here is what it looked like

After this step, it’s back to what I was used to doing and that’s the boil.  You boil the wort for 60 minutes, adding hops along the way at specific times.  The hops add both aroma and flavor to your beer.  After the boil, the wort is cooled down as rapidly as possible and added to the fermentor.  I was way off on quantity of wort, I only had 2/3 of a gallon, I had to add more water to the fermentor to get it up to the gallon mark.  Once I did that, I pitched the yeast which just means I put the yeast in and shook the fermentor to get the yeast going.

So far, I haven’t seen a lot of activity.  I hope I did everything correctly.  I don’t know why I didn’t have more liquid after the sparge and I hope I did the right thing by adding more water to the fermentor.  I am going to take a hydrometer reading this weekend to see where we are at.