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

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?