As mentioned earlier in the blog, the Freshy Fresh has arrived!
What a great time of year; the crisp, cold air begins to roll in, beers get a touch maltier, and our air conditioners surrender their grip on our windowsills, providing us with an open vista through which to view the changing of the season. Oh yeah… and the harvest! This year we will be recieving fresh hops from two different harvests (Wayne, Pa & New Paltz, Ny). The first round came from our friend, Matt Guyer, over at the Beer Yard. Behind his store grows a surprising amount of wild hop vines! They have been happily growing there for as long as he can remember, which is great for us, as they are well-established and literally dripping with sticky lupulin magic. About two weeks ago, I arrived at his store early in the morning, yanked all of the vines down and tossed ‘em in the back seat of my car. Once loaded up, I drove straight to the brewery, where a team of eager servers helped us separate the hop cones from the vine. My car was drenched in grassy, floral hop aromas; sure glad I didn’t get stopped by the fuzz on the drive back! All day, we yielded a bit more than two pounds of bright green hoppy love, and within hours, we had filled 4 firkins of our Ryesing (rye pale ale) with half-a-pound of fresh hops shoved into each cask. This is what we will be tapping on Tuesday 9/1. I expect this once a year treat to sell fast, so get it while you can! Next up, my own New Paltz, Ny hop stash!
-Jean
If you’ve been watching our ‘Upcoming Specials’ section you’ll notice we’ve got a beer called Heater Room coming up. This beer is KILLER! It’s a Belgian Brown Ale made with smoked American malt and pasilla peppers. It’s sweet, spicy, smokey, and just darn good. It’ll be ready soon, but I thought you’d all like to see this pic of Jean with a bucket full of pepper love. We put them in like dry hops right after fermentation was complete…..seeds and all. Yum!
GABFseason is upon us already! Man, a year goes really, really fast. It seems like I just cleaned up the mess from LAST years party! (We won a Silver medal for Cherry Dubbel). We’ll have lots to talk about for the Fest itself, but just a couple of Saturdays ago Andy Hejl came in to do a pro-am beer with us. There has been a new category for beers brewed as a collaboration between an award winning homebrewer (Andy) and a professional brewery (us). Andy brought us his killer helles recipe, which 
he is calling ’40 minutes of Helles’, and we went to work scaling it up for a full size brew session. The came off without a hitch and we were even joined by special guest Ashley from White Labs who gave the mash a stir too. We hope she’s good luck!
Chuck is running away!
It’s official. Chuck Norris’ Beard is the Most Baddest Beer we’ve ever brewed. Witness it trying to leave the fermenter yesterday. For those of you who don’t know Chuck, it’s a Super Hoppy Belgian IPA. 90 IBUs and about 9% Alcohol by volume (well we will see how much of the wort the Chuck Yeast decides it wants to eat. Oh, and it’s red just like the Man’s beard. We used and entire mini-bale of Amarillo hops for aroma. That’s too many hop cones for the kettle so Jean
Mash Tun Full o Hops
used the mash tun a as a hop back. Fans of the Mahalo, Apollo will be happy with this offering too we think. Incluces Kung Fu Action!
First off HOPZILLA is on tap right now. 65IBUs, American IPA.
Jean on Color Patrol
Now down to today. Right now we are brewing an old favorite of mine called Highland Flame. There’s a funny storie behind the name of this Scottish Ale: about 10 years ago I was asked to make a beer for the Scottish Highland Society. This group is a hoot. You know, men in skirts with daggers, LOTs and lots of bagpipes, little girls dancing, scotchscotchscotch. In any case they needed a Scottish Ale for their Highland Games (mostly head butting, rock throwing and drinking. My kind of people) and they had the name all ready to go. They wanted to call it Highland Fling which is the name of a famous highland dance. Turns out I can’t hear so well and all of the t-shirts and signage came back with HIGHLAND FLAME on ‘em. The beer rocked and all was forgiven. They did give me a sport kilt which they made me wear to the tapping party….
On to the beer. Highland Flame is a Scottish Ale low in alcohol and high in flavor. I like to think of it as dark beer for the summer. We used just a touch of this killer new smoked malt from Briess which I am also excited about. I stopped by Rock Bottom last night to borrow some Edinbourough Ale yeast from my friend Brian and have a few beers. I’m in fine ’Scottish form’ today, so this thing should be over the top. Expect a smoked porter made with the smoked malt soon too. Here’s a shot of Jean checking out the wort color. Sure looks tasty doesn’t it?
