What are you brewing?

[nzbrewer]

Since this is the most popular thread on the RealBeer.co.nz forum I thought I would start it here just to see what happens

[MrC]

Cheers guys.

Fermentation started at 18C and stayed there for the first two days. Since then it has slowly raised to 20C. I'll leave it there until next weekend and then bottle it. Hopefully the yeast will clean itself up.

[MrC]

I just bottled this Belgian Ale and the suplhur has complely gone. Maybe a little burnt matches in there but I find it hard to distinguish burnt matches from the phenols sometimes.

I left in on the yeast at 20c for a week after krausen subsided. No more belgian egg sandwiches!

[Alasdair]

I brewed a BPA with T58 the same weekend you did - seems to be the season! I'm kegging it today - happy to swap a bottle or two at some stage if you want to compare results. I got quite a lot of sulphur too for a couple of days; my most recent sample tasted of spice, but not curried eggs. :)

[Reviled]

I find it interesting how we all seem to follow similair trends with our brewing, probably not by choice but it just seems to happen that way... Like alot of us were playing round with Rye at the same time, all the Porters brewed around case swap time, and now theres a few Belgians out there.. I wonder why?

[Stu McKinlay]

Too much time on these forums!

I can't wait to taste the case swap Porters... Pot Kettle Black is back next on the Yeastie agenda so I might get an idea.

[Reviled]

Is there not something in between kid chocolate and PKB?? :o(

[Stu McKinlay]

No. Bringing PKB forward to June allows us to bring out something brand new for BrewNZ.

We've pretty much lined up beers until BrewNZ 2011. PKB will be the only repeat.

[Reviled]

Interesting, why the only repeat? Cos it was your first or cos of popular demand?

[Stu McKinlay]

Only just noticed this...

A few reasons:
First commercial beer (and my favourite homebrewed beer of all time, for sure!)
Popular demand
We love it so much ourselves
It is so unique
We think we can make it even better this year

I'd like to repeat the other beers too but we have other (new) things we'd like to do and we aren't interested in trying to make this a day to day thing.

[MrC]

It was tasting a couple of Stu's Belgian ales that made me want to brew one (thanks Stu). I wasn't planning on brewing it quite yet but the twinpack of T58 that I purchased had a expiry date of 06-2009 so I brought if forward on the brewing schedule.

T58 didn't take long to kick into life, vigorous foaming when rehydrating and bubbling away after 5 hours. Fastest I've seen for a dried yeast.

[Chris Banks]

Out of curiosity how did your Rock Hopper recipe work out???

[MrC]

I assume you're referring to this: Rock Hopper

It was an OK beer, but it didn't taste like Macs Hop Rocker. I would probably reduce the hopping if I was to brew it again, probably just drop the 10 min additions. I'm finding that the Macs Lager kits are quite caramelly and don't provide that plain pilsner base that I was hoping for. Maybe the kits that I have are old or have been mistreated.

It was a good beer for me to brew at the time as I was looking to familiarise my self with Nelson Sauvin and I needed beer for Xmas. I certainly achieved both of those goals.

I had a couple of issue with this beer that may be clouding my judgement of the recipe:
1. This was the first of what I believe were two bad packets of US-05. Ther beer ended up too sweet and cloudy as hell.
2. Unfortunately I hadn't fixed my "bad fermenter" issue and the batch slowly went sour/acidic/gushing. I still managed to drink most of if though :)

If you're looking for a Hop Rocker clone I'd say look elsewhere but if you're looking for a quick & easy Sauvin & Cascade beer then I’d say give it a go.

I don't intend brewing this recipe again.