Brew to Bremerton

So, I took the winter off from brewing. Working with Dan gave me lots of time to talk and think about brewing, so it was definitely on my mind, but never something I was actively doing. He went from someone who was interested in brewing to full blown homebrewer inside of a month or two. All those conversations about brewing gave me the itch to brew, and I needed to scratch that itch. My wife was going to be out of the house all day one Sunday, so I figured there was no better time to start brewing.

Since I hadn’t brewed in a while, I decided to keep the grain bill simple and do a fairly standard IPA to use up some of the hops I had on hand. Since I wanted to make an IPA, I took all my IPA hops out for this one, and they all happened to be West Coast hops, so I just lazily referred to this one as a “West coast IPA” as I talked about it with Dan. That wasn’t a worthwhile name for it, so I renamed it to the punk rock inspired name on the label you can see at the bottom of the post. It sat in primary for two weeks, due to vacationing, and I just racked straight to bottles after that, since I wanted to get it in the fridge ASAP. It turned out really clear, with the color exactly what I was aiming for. Pre-bottling sample tasted good, so I have high hopes for it.

I don’t have a picture of it, but I kinda messed up my mash cooler during the brew. I scooped off the foam from the hot break into it, but it was sitting too close to the burner while it was going, and the plastic got a little warped. I plan to borrow my father-in-law’s heat gun to warp it back into shape before I do my next brew.

Here are a few of the pictures I did take:

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