Stout & About, Pronounced in the Classical Canadian

I brewed a stout Thanksgiving Eve and I think it will be one even a tsar would enjoy.  As you'll see in the recipe at the end of the post, I inadvertently made up an imperial stout, and cleaned up the mess made from the vigorous primary fermentation to prove it.  This brewing also saw the introduction of more quantitative techniques and measurement, thanks to birthday gifts from my folks.  It wasn't too difficult, and I made a mistake that didn't harm anything but was a pretty bone head move on my part I was barely able to fix, and in the end the yeast actively chomped on sugars, so I think it was successful.

Malted and milled grains, hops, yeast.  Three of the four ingredient for great beer.

I've brewed a porter and it turned out amazing.  Not my words, but those who have tasted it have given it their thumbs up.  I've brewed a brown ale and while it's still maturing the first bottle was promising.  Being late autumn I want to have a stout for the colder weather, and so I combed my two books, poked around online, collected recipes and as I've done for my past two batches I used my brewing knowledge to come up with a recipe I can call my own.  Additionally, I'm ever-incorporating new techniques and technologies into my brewing to get the best beer my kitchen can produce and some birthday gifts came in handy this time in attempting a more precise mash.

Blog Updates and Future Ideas

I wanted to try to post to this blog once a week, but I haven't posted in a month, and the previous post was a month after the one before it.  When I started this blog I was super excited about homebrewing and wanted to share it with everyone.  But I'm also a graduate student and I started writing my thesis early October, so that has taken all my writing mojo to do.  And while I still greatly enjoy homebrewing and brew a batch about once a month, writing about it weekly is a bit more than I'm able to do right now.

That said, I think I will aim for more than once a month, but not as high as once a week.  I want to review the homebrewing books I read, and have received and read another one since my birthday two weeks ago.  I'd like to point out interesting websites I find, and have recently stumbled upon a few web-based calculators that have proved really useful in my brewing.  Of course I'll discuss breweries I visit and beers I try, and I hope to sample one of as many of the craftbrew Christmas Beers as I can this season and write about those.

These are the things I'd like to pursue in this blog in addition to my personal homebrewing.  I personally don't like to state things I want to do and then not follow through with them, but as I'm learning from my wife, it's not a bad thing to say you want to do something and not explicitly carry it out.  I'm trying to get into that mind frame, to be freer about what I want to do and what I actually accomplish.

With that in mind, I can't promise that I'll be posting more than I have, but that I haven't forgotten about this blog and would love to write more if time and energy permitted it.

Until next time friends, happy brewing!