Catch Me If You Can has been bottled.

Our attempt at a winter warmer has been bottled. It's a brown ale, spiced with the various ingredients of gingerbread - ginger, clove, cinnamon, molasses. It's called Catch Me If You Can, in reference to both the excellent Tom Hanks / Leo DiCaprio movie and to the fairytale The Gingerbread Man.

Our yield wasn't great, unfortunately; we only came out with about 4.5 gallons. Twenty-three 12oz bottles, thirteen 22oz bottles. Sediment level was very very low. That was a great sign. I do hope that there is sufficient yeast left to carbonate it fully, as this thing was sitting in the fermenters for roughly two weeks each. There was a second yeast pitching, though, so I think it should be alright.

At any rate, it will bottle condition for 10-14 days, then be refrigerated for a week at the very minimum. After that, it'll be drinkable, though I may let it age a bit more than that before I personally crack one open.

Next up, brewing a lager, sometime around the 15th of January. But sometime in the next week, there will be a little contest for all of you who are keeping up with our exploits. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

Cheers!

Another comprehensive brewing update!

This one, sadly, will be sans photos. My camera has died, which, as you may be aware, makes photographing the proceedings pretty difficult.

On with business...

Silver Crown IPA is a delicious number that Dana and I have been enjoying mightily over the last month. We didn't do any of the calculations for IBUs or gravity, but it's a goodly bitter beer, not too overwhelming. Probably around 6% ABV, if I had to guess. In the future, I think we will be better about taking measurements so we can have more quantitative and qualitative notes on our beers.

Over Thanksgiving break, Dana and I (Lauren was in Spain) brewed what we hope will be our next glorious beer. It is a gingerbread ale, with a brown ale as a baseline. We took ratios of ginger, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon and molasses from a number of gingerbread cookies and ramped them up a bit to suit the size of the brew. Unfortunately, we also had not one, but two boilovers - the first was less than 3 minutes into the boil! Things seem to have turned out alright, though. The first fermentation was needed some extra time, and it is now sitting in the secondary, where I think it will stay through the holiday weekend.

2011  looks like an exciting year for us. A local bar has agreed in principal to feature our beer on a test basis. They have asked for a case of It Takes Two to Tangelo, so we'll be whipping up a batch of that soon. We're also looking at brewing some sort of lager in January, so keep an eye out for that (I promise we'll be better about blogging in 2011. Call that our New Year's Resolution).

On the technical side of things, I think we are going to be stepping up our equipment a bit. I think the plan is to expand from 1x5 gallon rig to 2x5 gallon rigs. On top of that, we'll probably be building ourselves a wort chiller at some point between now and the spring. The weather is sufficiently cold that it's not a high priority addition right now, but we'll need it before the warmer weather returns.

There's also some exciting news coming in the near future, and it involves you, so stay tuned!