About 1.5 years ago, a friend of mine at work and me began discussing opening a small brewery in the Triangle area. Over that time, we’ve gotten more serious and are currently hard at work at making that dream a reality. The short term goal is not to quit our jobs or get rich, but rather to take the hobby to the next level in a big way. We are just about done building out a 1.5 BBL (46 gallon) brewery and are also trying to nail down a location. We’re searching for a bar/restaurant/whatever where we can take over a tiny section of unused space and make our own. Our name is Shade Tree Brewing Company. Our website is pretty basic, with most of the action taking place on our Facebook page at the moment. If you still follow this blog, friend our brewery on Facebook! You can follow the action there.

On August 1st, I went to the LoneRider Brew It Forward competition that they held at their brewery. It was a really fun day where they provided free beer and lunch for the participants and guests. Several of my friends showed up and we had fun talking about the equipment and trying the beer. Of course, the Shotgun Betty was terrific as always but I also got to try a Brown Ale and an ESB that are upcoming. They were both very tasty as well and I look forward to seeing them on tap soon. Thanks to everyone at LoneRider for the fun competition and good food/beer.

Now, on to the important stuff. I have officially been validated as a pretty decent brewer! The contest was set up with 4 flights of beers judged by teams of two people each. For each flight, there was a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place awarded. Of the 12 that got an award, there was a Best In Show round with the winner of that getting to brew commercially at LoneRider. In the end, two of my beers, my ama/coe ipa (called Snake Bite IPA for their Western theme) and my American Stout (called Saloon Stout) won First Place in each of their respective flights. I was pretty stoked about this already but then they announced that my Saloon Stout had also won Third in the Best In Show round. The medals they gave are really nice, custom medals and my Best In Show one says it on the back. I need to get a good place to display them above the keezer and I also need to get both of these beers back on tap.

In other news, I haven’t been brewing too much but I have done another Rye IPA, this time with 3 lbs of Malted Rye, 1 lb of Flaked Rye, and its hopped throughout with Nugget, including First Wort Hopping and dry hopping. Hope its tasty!

I’ve also been entering a couple competitions lately. I submitted my Orange Kolsch and my Imperial Stout to the Samuel Adams Longshot competition and I’ve entered those two, plus my Summer Wheat and ama/coe IPA (named because of the hops used) into the Lonerider competition, a local brewery here in Raleigh. I’m not really expecting to win either but I am looking for some feedback. I suppose there’s a chance on the Lonerider one because they cap it at 200 entries and four of those will be mine!

I also recently aquired a MIG welder and am busy learning how to weld. I hope to be building myself a three tier (as well as many other things) in the near future with it once I get some skillz.

Anyway, how are things in your brewing world?

In other news, I brewed round two of my award winning Crystal 40 this past Saturday. This beer is easy to make, tastes delicious, and the ingredients are cheap. I’m really looking forward to it being on tap for more than a week this time. I ended up keeping the recipe the same, figuring that I didn’t get enough time to really evaluate it the last time I made it before it was all gone. This time around, it should last longer and I also plan on brewing it again in 6 weeks or so in order to keep a steady supply. I guess that’s it about for now.

Happy Brewing!

Because of my total lack of knowledge in the finer points of hopping (despite reading several entire articles/magazines/chapters in books devoted to specifically this subject), I usually find my homemade recipes just going something along the lines of a 20/10/0 schedule. The idea is that I maximize and balance flavor and aroma sorta at the same time. This last 30 minutes of hopping is something I fully intend to explore with my Crystal 40. It’s currently at 30/10/0 with an increasing amount of hops as it goes along. My thinking is it takes more hops to impart aroma than it does flavor which, of course, is a theory I totally pulled out of nowhere. It seems that Dogfish Head has the right idea. Rather than trying to analyze what times best contribute to what aspects of the hops, they just start throwing ‘em in, a little at a time, throughout the whole boil. They definitely took the RDWHAHB approach and I can attest that I have created a few beers using this method and they were excellent.

The one main gripe I have about this method is all the hops thrown in between 59.5 minutes and about 30 minutes. If everything I’ve read is correct (which I hope it is or why else am I reading it), flavor and aroma are totally destroyed after more than 30 minutes of boiling. So, the only thing we’re getting out of this is bittering, except at a much lower utilization than the ones thrown in at 60. They could extract the same bittering potential by adding all their hops at 60 with a lower overall usage.

After all this rambling, I’m finally getting around to my actual point. For my next round of Crystal 40, I think I am going to modify my hop schedule in the last 30 minutes. I’ll stick with the 0.5 ounce of Chinook at 60, but for the remaining hops (2 oz Cascade), I’m just going to continuous hop it from 30-0. I’m hoping it will provide a more well-rounded interpretation of the hop.

Stay tuned for part 2 when I intend to ramble on about First Wort Hopping and Dry-hopping.

Also, for a complete list of all my recipes, check out my Recipes page.

No matter what happens, this is a BIG beer. I’m super excited to see what this is going to end up like but I guess I won’t know for many more months. If all goes well, I hope to age some for serveral years and see how it ages over time, we’ll see. In a couple weeks, I’ll probably take gravity reading to see how its coming along. Of course, I’ll also have to grab a quick sip although I’m not expecting much from it this early.

This upcoming weekend, however, will be the biggest, baddest beer I’ve ever done. Me and another brewer (Dave, who held the homebrew competition) are brewing a 9 gallon batch of 13% ABV Barleywine! This beer is gonna be HUGE! It has 43 pounds of grain (compared to 10 lbs average) and will test the abilities of ourselves and our equipment. Everything about it is big. The grain, the boil time, the sparge water, even the amount of yeast we’re using. We’re actually going to use the yeast cake from the IPA for this in order to get such a huge amount of yeast out of it. We’re targeting an OG of 1.128!! and hoping to get it down into the sub 1.020 range.

After the Barleywine, I’m torn as to what do next. The BW won’t be ready to drink for another 6-8 months so I’m not counting that in my figuring. Based on my list, I will have mostly light beers available so another dark beer may not hurt. Perhaps another porter that I’ll brew on my one year brewing anniversary… since a porter was the first beer I ever brewed. If you have any ideas of what I should do next, let me know in the comments.