Today we brewed up one batch of beer and one of mead. This is the first time I try making mead, i.e. honey wine, and I must say that the pre-fermentation must was tasting promising! The beer is an Imperial IPA (though more in IPA territory, as the efficiency was slightly lower than predicted) inspired by The Alchemist’s Heady Topper. We used a malt bill consisting of Pearl malt, Carahell and Wheat malt, supplemented with some cane sugar during the boil to further dry out the beer. We hopped it with enormous amounts of Amarillo, Apollo (first time using it, smelling awesome!), Centennial, Columbus and Simcoe. Oh, and we also used 15 ml of Hop Extract for bittering (theoretical IBU yield of around 120). After fermentation we will throw in even more hops for dry-hopping. The beer will be fermented with Conan, which I harvested from a can in the beginning of this year and has been on an agar plate since. The starter was smelling very peachy and fruity, so it should bring some nice tones to the game. Can’t wait to try it out! The brewday went quite well, but we ended up with 22 liters of 1.065 wort instead of 20 liters of 1.072 wort, so the beer will have slightly lower ABV than intended.

[beerxml recipe=http://beer.suregork.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/heady_topper.xml metric=true cache=-1]

For the mead we used a simple recipe of 10 liters of water, 3.2 kg of honey (various sorts), 0.5 kg of brown sugar, 100 g ginger, 2 lemons and one small pack of raisins. We allowed the water to come to boil, and we added in 3 g of yeast nutrient, the raisins, the sugar and the ginger. After a couple of minutes we added in the lemons and the honey, and allowed it to cool. We then pitched some white wine yeast and placed to ferment at 18C. The OG was 1.095, which will result in 10-14% ABV depending on when the yeast decides to quit. I wouldn’t mind a slightly sweet mead. Can’t wait to try it in a couple of weeks/months. During the day we also had time to keg and bottle our recent Black Rye IPA, which was tasting quite promising. There was quite alot of suspended yeast still, but otherwise the flavor was bitter, lightly roasted and hoppy. Gravity had fallen to 1.015, giving an ABV of 6.4%. Should be a really nice beer for the cold autumn evenings.

[beerxml recipe=http://beer.suregork.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/mead.xml metric=true cache=-1]