Almost ready for the big day

We've got the beers bottled and labeled we're buying the food today and we'll be cleaning off the deck whenever this rain decides to go away.  It's supposed to be a beautiful day Saturday high in the 60's and sunny.  We're looking forward to seeing all of you there.

Cheers!!

Most recent update on the brewing

The beers we've been brewing and the ones we think we're gonna brew soon.

Been brewed...
Maple Porter


Been Bottled
Summer ale
Sinfully Vanilla
Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout
Razzle Dazzle Raspberry wheat
Honey squeeze my lemon ale
Pumpkin ale
Pomegranate Wheat
IPA (unnamed) 8/5/11  dry hopped with my homegrown cascade hops on 8/25/11

Upcoming possible brews!!!
 
Imperial IPA (using homegrown hops)
Black Butte porter clone for Jim
Barley wine for Jenna


Have any idea's for a brew we should do? Email us at:

otisbrewing@gmail.com

Wild Yeast

So after being forced to work a double shift, I came home to a starter wort that was actively fermenting without me having added any yeast.  For all of you who don't know what that means, we brewers make a very small "starter" which is just a small amount of wort, a.k.a beer after it's been boiled but before the yeast is added.  This starter helps the yeast get ready for the big time.  Think of it like a professional sports team playing a college team.  Anyways, yeast is what makes beer....well beer.  Yeast eat sugar and turn it into alcohol; awesome isn't it.  But yeast sometimes need a little warm up hence the starter.  Well normally I add the yeast I want to add, but because I was stuck working much longer than anticipated, and the jar sat open longer than expected, some wild yeast found their way in and started eating up those sugars and voila! wild yeast!  They have a nice sour flavor which is typical for wild yeast and so I'm thinking of making a farmhouse ale.  Farmhouse ales are what most people drank back in the 1700's before we knew what yeast was.  Back then they just called it God is Good, a very appropriate name if you ask me! 

Hops Picking

 

So it took a while to put up them up but these are the pictures of our harvesting day.  We got over 4 ounces of hops once they were dried.  It was a good thing we picked them when we did because about 4 days later Hurricane Irene came and tore down the tree branch you see in the video holding up the hops.  She also slightly broke one of the trellis's.  Over all though we had a successful harvest and look forward to getting much more next year.  

Putting him to work early!!

Success!!!

The wedding beers were a huge success everybody seemed to really like them.  It was a great time had by all and our labels held up better than expected.  We've recently done another collaborative brew with George and this time we did a Pumpkin ale.  We gutted an 11 lb pumpkin and roasted it for about an hour then added it to the mash.  We also added some spices too, the end result smells delicious so we'll be looking for to trying it after it's done fermenting.

Recent activities

We've recently done another collaboration with George and this time we brewed up a Peanut butter chocolate stout!  When we added the peanut butter noticeable amounts of oil were on top so we're not sure how that's going to work.  However fermentation is going great and the air lock seems to be blowing off a scent of peanut butter!!!



Also on Thursday 8/25/11 we decided to go on an adventure to find wild hops, and we succeeded!! The only problem was the hops were surrounded by other thick vegetation and were very high up so we were not able to get any.  I'm planning on trying to find more, but we also marked where we were and we may return in the spring to see if we can get some cuttings from these hops and transplant them to our yard.

Wild hops

 

Update

Well it's been a busy week, but I can report that the Honey Lemon Ale and The Chocolate Oatmeal stout taste great!! Now I'll be bottling The strawberry and Raspberry wheat's in the next few days.  Also I'm keeping a close eye on the hops they should be ready real soon.  We will be doing the Chocolate peanut butter stout soon but probably not this week.  I'm probably going to brew up some additional honey squeeze my lemon ale real soon too.