Begin Brewing!

A few months ago, I purchased a a beer from Strange Roots Experimental Ales that was made with 78% barley and 22% local honey, fermented with a wild local yeast.  Although it was somewhere between a mead and a beer, I found it really tasty.  I tried making my own version, which wasn't bad, but was nothing like theirs.  Today I decided to try my own twist on their beer. Like the Strange Roots brewery, I'm going to use a 78% Pale Ale malt base with 22% clover honey added late in the boil.  I'll be using Southern Passion hops late in the boil (5 minutes) to give it some interesting tropical fruit notes and flavors.  I'll use The Yeast Bay's Wallonian Farmhouse Ale yeast to ferment it.  That yeast is said to impart a slight funk, slight tartness, and some spicy/smoky notes.  It's also a diastatic yeast, so it should have no problem chewing through all the malt I'll be using.   Ingredients 8 pounds and 10 ounces of Viking Pale Ale malt 2 pounds and 7 ounces of

Gulden Draak is one of my favorite Belgian beers.  Any day I find it on draft somewhere at a bar or restaurant is a good one, as far as I'm concerned.  I've wanted to brew a good clone of it for a long time. The clone kits from Austin Homebrew are said to be good ones, so a couple of months back I decided to order their Gulden Draak Clone Kit . When it arrived, and despite my years of homebrew experience, I was a bit intimidated.  The kit contains over 20 pounds of grain, well outside the limits of The Grainfather's kettle. I was intimidated enough by the sheer bulk of it that I put off brewing it until now.  Today, I forced myself to take it on. I decided the best way to get a good result from it was to break the mash down into three iterations of seven pounds each.  This amount of grist is where The Grainfather tends to be pretty efficient at conversion.  But this meant three separate grain loads and sparges.  That's quite a lot of work, and shows just how much I love

The more I've learned about Kveik yeast, the more tempted I am to try pushing it to do new things. It's my understanding that Kveik is very tolerant of high gravity worts, low pitch rates, and of course high temperatures.  My goal with this brew is to see if I can push it to produce a beer that is at or above 16% ABV.  Although I did start with an award-winning barleywine recipe from the AHA web site, I've altered it so much here that it's no longer recognizable.  (Update 7/11/2020:  I based this goal on the limits of the Voss strain in its non-isolated form. Later, I learned that the Lallemand isolate version is limited to 12%, which I had no problem hitting.) Some of the changes I made included raising the gravity significantly, adding demerara sugar in place of some of the malt to dry it out a little, using German Northern Brewer hops to bitter, and adding a flavor addition of Mandarina Bavaria and Bramling Cross late in the boil.  I also used Pilsner malt extract to