This past Saturday saw the continuation of a tradition I started in my old digs of West Chester, the anual wort give-away that leads to the Iron Brewer Competition.  Every year I make an anomaly of a beer that for lack of a better classification I’ve called “Golden Barleywine”.  As the name would suggest it’s golden and strong.  So it uses 100% Pilsner malt and LOTS of it.  The OG is so high that I have to fill my mash tun up twice to get enough sugars for one kettle’s worth of beer.   In order to insure we get the alcohol content we want we only use the first bit of liquid that comes out of the tun.  What that means is that at the end of our run off, there’s still plenty of sugar left in the mash tun.  Enough to make another batch of reasonable strength beer.  That’s where the homebrewers come in, literally.  They come in with 5 gallon buckets and take home the wort or unfermented beer and make their own batches with it.   (We always brew this beer on a Saturday or Sunday so everyone can have the day off to brew.)  They put their own spin on each brew, using their choices of specialty malts, hops, yeast, fermentation temperature etc.  Then a month later, they bring their creations back and we see who’s is the best!  (Got the Iron Chef parallel here?).  If nothing else we save the homebrewers some money, time and a bit of mess.  We offer them yeast to take home too, so all they have to pay for is hops and whatever specialty malts they may or may not want to use.  This past Saturday was the first time I’ve done the giveaway in Maple Shade, but the turnout was just as strong as it was in West Chester.  (Free stuff, go figure!)  We had around 20 people come in and take home about 130 gallons of wort.  I can’t wait to see what these folks come back with.  I’m amazed at the range of beers that are made with the same wort.  Homebrewers are a creative lot!  Photos by Melissa Jaarsma