Batter Up - Spring is Here!

This weekend will be the first in quite some time that we're not freezing our butts off for the glory of brewing.  Spring has arrived at Good Scarlett HQ.

At the plate is the Edel-Hell again (A.K.A. Edelicious!).  If we could brew more than 20 gallons of this liquid gold we would because this beer is impossible to keep around.  Not too many people have tasted it yet because, frankly, we've been hoarding it.  We promise to let some of this batch out in to the wild for people to try.

On deck is Shawn's Triple A (American Amber Ale) - another fantastic beer.  I had a pint of it on St. Patrick's Day and was again reminded of how tasty this hoppy ale is.

In the hole, possibly the Four Shepherds Stout although we may put in a pinch hitter as we still have a lot of stout at the moment.  We're also performing some equipment upgrades that will allow us more flexibility in our brewing schedule.  Right now we have to stick to an Ale, Ale, Lager, Lager pattern.  The equipment upgrades will free us from having to follow any pattern at all.  This means that we could brew the Edel here again if we wanted.  Awesome.

The Whitetail Ale has been kegged.  Obviously, we waited a bit too long to brew this "holiday" style beer - I don't think Memorial Day is supposed to count.  We'll do better next year.  This beer is a slugger (for us) at 6.7% ABV.  We don't usually make beer this strong (we like to drink beer, not fall down) but it was a big hit last year.  We recommend drinking it while already in the prone position to save time.

Happy Spring everyone!

What Fresh New Hell Is This?

We've been working on a Helles here for quite a while now and although we have made some great tasting beer, we've never given ourselves a passing grade.

The Helles is a tough beer to make.  It's so light and subtle with no place to hide any mistakes in the recipe or brewing process.

We spent a lot of time over several batches of our beer and several score of our favorite commercial examples of the style.  One big issue was narrowing down the yeast that we preferred and another was fine tuning boil times and the temperatures during fermentation - specifically performing a proper Diacetyl rest.

I actually forgot to do the Diacetyl rest on the last batch.  I'm drinking a pint now and it tastes like I dropped a pat of butter in it.  This makes me sad.

When we started, we began with a recipe that tried to make up for the fact that most homebrewers don't do decoction mashes.  This was fine, because at the time, we were not doing them either.  The recipe was very good and can be found here.

Now, however, we are performing decoction mashes with consistency.  We've also fine tuned our current brewing process so that we are hitting all our numbers within .001 SG and we have good data on fermentation temperatures, boil times, and hopping rates from previous batches of Helles.

So, it's time to start over.

Our next batch will be our all new Edel-Hell.  German breweries use the term "edel" (which means "noble") for their most delicate versions of Helles.  The recipe uses only German Pilsner 2-Row barley and a little bit of Carapils for the head.  It has 3 hop additions with a different type of noble hops each for bittering, flavor, and aroma.

We're excited about brewing this beer and even more excited about drinking it!

Here Come the Kegerators

Some of the boys have wanted to go in on batches with us, so we've started to assemble kegerators for them.  It turns out finding free refrigerators is easy as pie Craigslist.  I've picked up two and delivered them to the guys in the last 10 days.

We're in the process now of collecting the rest of the parts we need (shanks, lines, etc) as well as procuring CO2 bottles and regulators.  All in all these kegerators are going live for less than $150 each which is pretty good.  Plus, the guys get the extra freezer space, etc.  Good deal.

What is going on in Montana?

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