Begin Brewing!

Disclaimer: While searching for a good IPA recipe, I discovered the following on a forum online. I am not claiming authorship of the recipe below. If the forum post I read is factual, and I have no reason to think it isn't, this recipe includes input from one of the Rhinegeist brewmasters. That means it probably can produce a beer very close to the original. I plan to brew it at some point to see how it turns out. For now, I'm just documenting and sharing the recipe here. Update 06/11/2017:  I've actually tweaked the recipe for my equipment and brewed a batch, following as much of the brewmaster's guidance as possible.   You can see the results here . Ingredients 8.5 pounds of Rahr Pale Malt (67.3%) 2.75 pounds of Golden Promise Malt (19.5%) 12 ounces of Briess Vienna Malt (5.3%) 10 ounces of Carared Malt (4.4%) 8 ounces of Flaked Rye (3.5%) 0.65 ounces of Bravo hops pellets @ 15.0% AA (60 minutes) 0.71 ounces of Centennial hops pellets @ 10% AA (20 minut

My wife is a big fan of pumpkin ales. Some time ago, I purchased the ingredients for one that I never got around to making until today. If you look at the Northern Brewer web site, you may recognize this as being similar to their Smashing Pumpkin Ale recipe. That was my starting point. I added Butternut Squash to it because we had one in the kitchen that we had no plans for. I also added Melanoidin Malt to give it a little bit of the crust/biscuit flavor that you find in Southern Tier's Pumking. I could have added Victory Malt like they do, but I am hoping the Melanoidin will give a more subtle crust-like flavor and some added sweetness to accentuate the pumpkin pie flavor profile. I bought the grain for this recipe over a year ago and hadn't used it. I decided to get it out and make it, not knowing if the age of the grain would ruin the result or not. Even if it did, I figured it would be good practice to make it. The Recipe 7.5 pounds 2-Row Pale Malt 2.5 pounds

If you've read this blog for any amount of time, it's no secret that I am fan of Belgian style ales. I've made at least six different Tripel recipes that I can remember, several Quadrupels, two or three Trappist Singles, and before this, two Dubbels. One was an extract beer that turned out OK. The other was an all-grain beer that was easy to drink but just didn't hit the mark for me. The recipe I brewed on February 5, 2017, started out as a clone of La Trappe Dubbel. La Trappe's Dubbel is one of my favorites. When I started assembling the ingredients for this one, I began wondering about my Saaz hops. They were a bit older, and were only 3.2% alpha acid to start with. My concerns were that they might not bitter the beer enough, and that adding a lot of them might trigger a grassy flavor in the finished beer. So I made the decision to use some German Northern Brewer hops to handle the bittering. They were fresh and certainly strong enough at 10.1% alpha acid. I wou