Brew Day: The Scotch Ale Adventure!

To inaugurate our newly bought 15 gallon, stainless steel mash/lauter tun (MLT) with ball-valve we brewed a Scotch Ale. This is a very simple Scotch Ale, maybe too simple. For the grains, I purchased  5kg of two-row pale malt and 1kg of a darker caramel malt. For the yeast, I bought a vial of Burton Ale Yeast (WLP023). And, I already had a 50g bag of Tettnanger hops in my freezer. All ingredients for this brew day were bought at La Chope A Barrock. Sadly, we lost the sheet our recipe was written on during the clean up, so I will give you all the quick and simple version... minus the details.

Brew Day: Vanilla Wulfgang Stout!!

Welcome to another awesome Brew Day adventure. A friend of mine commissioned us to make him a vanilla stout. Of course, we could not refuse. We developed a recipe based on a few criteria: vanilla, stout... voila. Well, he wanted the stout to be sweet and have the aroma/flavour of vanilla. So we did have a couple of factors to figure out i.e. how thick to make the mash, and mash temperature. Let us not forget the ingredients, hopping schedule, vanilla additions, primary, secondary, bottling, and most importantly the tasting. It is a little bit past one month since the day this brew was conceived, we definitely do not expect it to last much longer... it is a wonderful beer! The beer was named after my friend, who became my brewing partner for this collaborative brew. 

Brew Day: Belgian Golden Ale with a Twist!!

We just cannot get enough beer over here so we just keep making more and more and more.... We would like to welcome you all back for another brew day. On this day we will be brewing a Belgian Golden Ale with Chamomile and Juniper berries. Here we go!

Brew Day: Dark Wheat IPA with Anise & Lavender!!

A dark wheat IPA with anise and lavender, who would have thought....to be honest we do not know where this idea came from. Well, that is only half true. The choice of herbs was inspired by one of our walks through the Jean-Talon market, however the beer style i.e. dark wheat IPA was quite random. This beer was our second batch of the summer. Summer brewing can be difficult, given that the cellar is warmer than it should be, and water temperature from the faucets is higher than we want it to be, all of which leads to higher fermentation temperatures. That is not to say that there are no solutions out there, there are, but at this point we had yet to implement any. On this particular day we decided to brew outdoors, it was a beautiful day for brewing. Now let the brewing begin!

HomeBrew Shop: La Chope à Barrock

Today we bring you deeper into the world of homebrewing by introducing you to our favourite homebrew shop, La Chope à Barrock. We have been homebrewing for almost three years now, and it is thanks to Stephane Laroch - proprietor of  La Chope à Barrock - for his guidance that we made it this far.

EPF!: Secondary and Bottling

Secondary carboy with dry hopped EPF!, you can see the dissolved Helga hop residue around the upper part of the carboy.

Hi Home Brew Fans!

We are back and ready to tell you all about our secondary and bottling experience. The transfer of beer into a secondary carboy is pretty straightforward but nonetheless a crucial step in adding tones of character to the beer. Secondary is done to get the beer off the yeast bed, for various reasons, as well as to add the hops -- a process that is called dry hopping. As I mentioned in the last post we dry hopped with Helga pellets (50g). The pellets are much more economical but like everything else in life they don't compare to the non-processed stuff i.e. whole leaf hops.

Brew Day: EPF!

Brew day, a very charged afternoon of sterilizing, boiling, cooling, and cleaning. It had been a little while since our last brew day, in fact, since February. We started off a little rusty and we had some cob webs to shake off the equipment. We always seem to forget the steps after a couple months of not brewing, only normal though. On this brew day we are going to brew an American Pale Ale, dry hopped in secondary with helga - for more info check out Hops.com.au. This will be an all grain batch, only our fifth to date. Let us begin!