2 Monkeys Brew

So our crazy plan is to brew 15 gallons of beer in one brew day

Beer Number one weighing in at ten gallons, an all grain batch of our belgian single we call spotted monkey. One 5 gallon keg of this is going to be served at our awesome friends (Ben & Elizabeths) wedding celebration. The second will be all for us. I think we may put some wild yeasties in there as well and let them do some magic.

Beer Number two will be a nice extract IPA that will also come to help celebrate Ben and Elizabeth. I am so far thinking Citra and Centennial hops, but who knows what we will decide last minute.

This will be the most beer we have produced in a day … but we have recruited some awesome brewing help from some friends. Cheers, and wish us luck!

We went to New York for a wonderful trip to visit some very cool friends of ours. So we decided to stay in town and just spend christmas together. So of course we did a xmas brew! 10 gallons of glorious american ipa to keep us warm. Cheers!

We were planning a greek ‘party at the island of the lesbos’ new years eve party. along with a lot of tasty greek food, home made pita bread, gyro meat, and all the fixings, we needed a beverage to fit the event.

We concocted a bubbly apple and pomegranate champagne like beverage to have on tap for the event. 4 gallons of apple juice, 64 ounces of pure pomegranate juice and 3 pounds of corn sugar did the trick. We topped each glass with those juicy little pomegranate seeds. Next time I may use even more pom, but good stuff for sure!

This is the same spotted monkey/Belgian single we always make. This time we stepped it up to ten gallons. The first keg was primed and enjoyed during our new years eve celebration. The second keg is still conditioning. We tasted a beer our friend James Spencer brewed up where he added the last of an orval to the beer when bottling to get some funky belgian bugs in his brew. We both really loved that beer. James really never brews anything we don’t love. We dosed our keg the same way and we are giving the bugs some time to bring the funk. Cheers!

Notes

We found a really wonderful source for local and affordable blueberries over the summer. We bought A LOT of them. We made smoothies, pies, ate em with yogurt … just about everything! We froze them too to make blueberry mead, but we also had a crapload of plums form our tree that overproduced. So we decided to try plum mead and make blueberry wine. Then we decided let’s make that port. Knowing next to nothing about making port wine, we consulted the internet and our buddy Andy Sparks who owns the happiest place in Fayetteville (The Home Brewery).

Basically to make the port you ferment the wine and stop the yeast by pouring brandy in there which raises the alcohol level beyond what the yeast can manage, which makes it a fortified wine. Andy had an interesting wine yeast at the store we decided to try, WLP770 – Suremein Burgandy. We started that up with some grape juice and it took off nicely.

Roughly our recipe: Ten pounds of frozen and then thawed awesome local bluesberries, 1# if LDME, 2 gallons of water, 3.5# sugar, 1T acid blend, 1T pectic enzyme, 2 campden Tablets.

We mixed everything together in a bucket, ; let it sit for 24 hours so the campden tablets could do their magic. We pitched the yeast starter. Fermentation was going crazy after a few days, we stirred the mixture around three times a day because the blueberries rise to the top while fermenting and block the c02 from escaping which can kill your fermentation pretty quick! Also it is a good idea to add some yeast nutrient a few times.

After 7 days we transferred to secondary and added 3 bottles of brandy and 2oz of oak chips. This is where the brew stands today, I will edit this post as I know more!

notes

Dear Victory Brewing,

wow, what can I say … thank you for making the most awesome pilsner I have tried so far in my life. I teared up when I took my first sip of Prima Pils. Could you send me the recipe? Please! I promise it will only be used for home brewing purposes. We cannot even buy your beer where I live.

Lots of love,
Kasey the Arkansas BrewMonkey

There are a lot of great ideas for clone recipes for Victory

Jen's Notes on Decoction

Brewing’s Prima Pils. Most involve decoction mashing. We did a double decoction and had a hard time getting the temperature we were looking for, but the brew is smelling and initial sampling is tasting good. I hear if you add a little Melanoidin malt to the mash, it will add the same character, we may try that next time. The brew is lagering now so more to come!

Buddy

I wanted to introduce you to our official brew taster Mr. Buddy the Brew Gnome. He helps taste our brews. He claims he is originally from Belgium, so we listen to this self proclaimed expert. Also because he is so tiny, he gets wrecked super fast, so there is always someone around drunker than us.

Tap Label

in the glass!

We sure do love those farmhouse style Belgian ales! It is amazing that this is our first Bière de Garde we have ever brewed. We looked at a few recipes and ended up making up our own. I will admit that we forgot totally to add the corn sugar we were going to add to the kettle while making this beer which would have lightened up the body. I for one think that might have been a happy mistake because this beer has a perfect maltiness to it. The White Labs Belgian Ale yeast gave it a wonderful fruity character. I hope this one last till thanksgiving because I think it would go wonderfully with our feast this year!

One of many buckets filled with plums we got from Plumy

fermenting

stirring

Our poor plum tree. We refer to her endearingly as ‘Plumy’. She suffered a huge ice storm early 2009. She did not produce any fruit that year. In 2010 Plumy outdid hearself. Bearing so much fruit that her branches were bending and touching the ground! Some branches even snapped from the weight. The plums produced were amazingly plentiful, sweet, juicy and so delicious! We picked as many as we possibly could, pitted and froze them for some kind of brewing future.

That brewing future turned out to be plum mead, or melomel which is the word for fruit mead. Jen actually mixed this one up by herself on one of those holidays city workers get off and computer monkeys like me have to work. She used 15# of clover honey, 16# of pitted, then frozen and thawed plums and 3 gallons of H20. We stirred this a couple times a day and periodically added yeast nutrient because honey is hard on yeast.

10 days later we transferred this to secondary and that is where it stands today. More to come …

This is a quick brew we threw together to get a nice little american ale on tap soon! We just kegged it and it tastes wonderful. We are keg conditioning it right now and it will be carbonated and ready to be hooked up to the next available empty tap!

Grain:
8# Maris Otter
1# Belgian Biscuit
8oz Melanoidin
3oz Chocolate

Hops:
all whole leaf
.35oz Galena (13.5%) @ 60min
.75oz Amarillo(9.4%) @ 20min
.5oz Centennial(11.2%) @ 5min
.5oz Amarillo(9.4%) @ flameout
.5oz Centennial(11.2%) @ flameout

Yeast: Safale US-05 (the pink pack)