Hop, Drop, and Roll

Long time friend Ryan came over last night for yet another brew session. Ryan is a great chef and likes to tinker with food recipes (and loves beer) so it seemed fitting for him to get into home brewing. One thing home brewing does is to allow people to create all sorts of crazy hooch, I think Ryan will soon be a home brew addict :-)

For this recipe, we changed the hop scare kit sold by Midwest brewing. We added another ounce of cascade continuously to the beer for the final 20 minutes. I also plan to dry hop the beer with an ounce of centennial and two ounces of Amarillo (premium plug hops). We also added roughly a pound of honey to increase the ABV. By my calculations, we should get a brew with roughly 8% ABV. This past year, I broke two hydrometers so from now on, its all guesses. I used Safale S04 for the yeast.

I'm also trying a method called double drop fermentation. In this method, you let the fermentation go for roughly 24 hours and then rack the beer and discharge much of the brewing trub. Tonight I racked the beer and everything seemed to go well until 30 minutes after transfer. The racking stirred up the beer and cause a VERY VERY vigorous fermentation until the brew was spilling out of the airlock (I was using a 6 gallon better bottle). I then had to run to the basement and grab a blow off tube so my "fermentation closet" didn't get too messy. It the most vigorous fermentation that I have seen yet. I guess that's good news??? I'm now going to wait at least three weeks before transferring the beer to the secondary and dry hop with the three ounces of hops.

Double Dropping

Blew right through the airlock after 20 min Switched to blow off tube