Upcoming Competitions

The preliminary results are in for the Sam Adams Homebrew-B-Que competition that Eric posted about a few days ago and we did not advance to the finals. We entered Brains Explosion and Honey Brains and we had high hopes for them, but given the time of year of the contest and the preference of the judges (Eric knows that some of them are "hop-heads"), we probably shouldn't have been surprised by the result. IPAs and other mostly hoppy beers moved on to the finals. We are awaiting the judges comment cards, which we should receive within a week, but we will chalk this up as a learning experience. I still think we have two pretty good barleywines which should only improve with age and hopefully they will perform better in future competitions.

Next up is the 19th annual Spirit of Free Beer competition sponsored by Brewers United for Real Potables (BURP). We have entered Honey Brains and Weizenheimer for this competition. Weizenheimer should be ready to try and Eric sampled one last night and gave generally positive feedback. It was bottled two weeks ago, so it could probably use a little more conditioning. Judging for this competition takes place on May 14th, so hopefully the extra week of conditioning will allow the flavors and carbonation to fully develop.

We are still in the planning stages for our entry in the Pilsener Urquell Master Home Brew competition in August, although we have all the equipment we need to get started now and we will be brewing soon.

Brains 2.2 Brew Day

This past Thursday we got together to brew our last barleywine of the year. This version is basically the same recipe that we used for Honey Brains, but we added brown sugar instead of honey. We don't have an official name for this batch yet, but I like "Slow" Brains, as a reference to the molasses that the brown sugar is made from. We also bottled our hefeweizen, which we are currently calling Theros, but I think we should change the name to Eisenhower, since our friend Jillian pointed out that hefeweizen is corrected to Eisenhower when using spell check. Although, as I am writing this, the firefox built in spell checker is suggesting Weisenheimer, which I think I like even better, haha. Omar was on hand to photograph the days events. I think his pictures came out great. Here's a selection to give you a feel for how the brew day went.

The brewers making preparations.

Brown Sugar! How come you taste so good?


More Pictures After the Jump

Unwittingly Appropriate

I just found out about this from following the Port City Brewery's Twitter account (@portcitybrew). I'm not sure how I missed it in the paper, but it turns out that the day before we brewed "Theros", the planet Earth lost a craft brew pioneer famous for reviving and popularizing the Belgian witbier style of beer. Theros isn't exactly a Belgian wit, but we did tweak the recipe for a German hefeweizen in a way that might make it taste a little bit more like a wit. Typically, hefeweizens do not use flavoring and bittering hops in their recipes, whereas Belgian wits do, and we decided to add some, mostly because we had some extra hops that we weren't going to need for Brains 2.2, but also because we thought it would make for an interesting beer. Although we did not intend Theros to be a tribute, it is somewhat fitting that we did what we did the day after Pierre Celis, the original founder of the Hoegaarden brand (among others) and a proponent of craft brewing, passed away. I think I'm going to have a Hoegaarden tonight...

Read more about Pierre Celis here.

Bottling/Brewing and New Capacity

Tomorrow promises to be quite an exciting evening for us here at the DC Beer Journey. We're going to bottle our hefeweisen "Theros" tomorrow. This is our first foray into an ale that is not a barleywine, so I'm psyched to see the color and grab a taste before bottling. If all goes well, we'll be entering this beer (along with Honey Brains) into the BURP.org Spirit of Free Beer competition in May. Dan is housing the fermenter so he's the only one who's tried it during primary fermentation...he assures me it's great.

During bottling, we'll also be starting our last barleywine of 2011. In Brains 2.2, we'll be using a pound of brown sugar instead of honey. After primary fermentation, we'll finally use the oak barrel I purchased at the Beer, Bourbon and BBQ festival at the beginning of April. The poor thing has been filled with water the whole time. Water! (On a related note, does anybody want to buy 5 gallons of oaked water? I hear it tastes delicious. Or terrible. One of the two.) At first v2.2 was going to be called Sweet Brains. But since we decided to use the barrel, I've been wavering. I kind of like Barrel Brains, or maybe Wood Brains. Charred Brains? Sweet Brains? Does anybody have a preference?

On top of that, we've recently expanded capacity and capabilities. I went over to MoreBeer! and purchased my own home brew kit. Now we can brew more than once every two weeks. I also purchased a chest freezer and digital temperature control. Hello lagers! We have about three months to figure out a great pilsner for the Pilsner Urquell home brew competition in August. We hope to get started in the coming weeks.

Last thing: apparently we have an audience tomorrow for this whole thing. Our friend, Omar, wants to tap his inner photographer (pictures coming to the blog!) and other friends want to hang out and see what it's all about. In case you were wondering, it's mostly about standing around waiting for the wort to boil for the right amount of time. At least we can have somebody else disinfect our bottles (my least favorite job) while we can take our time measuring out grains and hops. Even taking our time, that should take 6 minutes. Our brewing and bottling also entails classic rock and drinking beer. This is what brewing for a living is like...right?

The Beginnings - Eric's Version of Events

Fittingly enough, this whole thing started while brewing beer.  A couple of years ago, our friend, Matt, decided to brew beer at Shenandoah Brewing for his birthday.  This was the first time I met Casey and Dan.  Even though they look absolutely nothing alike, I mixed up their names for about 5 months after that.  Anyway, Matt and I being teachers, we named our brown ale After School Special.  Well it was supposed to be "speciale" (pronounced spesh-ale) but his girlfriend didn't hear us right and wrote down After School Special on the label.

I was new to craft beer at the time.  I thought Dogfish Head was the be-all and end-all of craft beer.

Fast forward a while to our next brew, also at Shenandoah.  We decided to make a barleywine and call it Brains.  The name had something to do with the beer being ready around Halloween and possibly having a zombie on the label.  I don't remember exactly why, because we'd been drinking.  I'll just go ahead and say that's why it was called that.  It was decent.  Our visions of slight fruit undertones were undermined by intense peach flavoring that made it age poorly.  But we were proud nontheless.

A while after that (a year or so) we again decided to brew, but homebrewing is cheaper.  The kitchen has been the scene for our concoctions the last few months.  We're continuing to evolve our technique, style and skill.  This year we have brewed two follow-up beers: Brains 2.0 and 2.1.  We also just finished brewing our first hefeweisen (tentatively called Theros).  We're competing in three homebrew competitions in the coming months and are about to journey into the world of lagers.

This is our story.