On to day 3 and it’s time for an old favourite to come out. The Harviestoun Ola Dubh range is great, and I’d have been happy having any one if them in my selection. I’ve picked the ’18’ for no other reason than it was sat in front of the others in my fridge. If you’ve not come across this before, it’s a stout-like dark ale, aged in various Highland Park whisky casks, in this case one that previously contained an 18 year old.
Category:
Beer
Having got day 1 out of the way finally, it’s time for day 2 of the 12 Beers of Xmas. As yet there’s no firm running order for the beers, but with it still technically being a ‘school night’ the big guns will have to wait a few days before they come out. So beer number 2 of 12 is a 5% homebrew APA using a Brett blend.
Read More12 Beers of Xmas – Day 2 – Funky Vermont
Having been away from home last night, day 1 of my 12 beers is actually happening on day 2… Better late than never I think!
Beer 1 is a new one, released only last week from the chaps down the road at Wild Beer. ‘Millionaire’ is described on the bottle as “Salted Caramel + Chocolate + Milk Stout” and you can’t really argue with that as a description.
I’ve been ‘cellaring’ a few of my more special beers over the last year or so, with the intention of drinking a few of them over Christmas. Handily there were at least a dozen good ones to choose from, so I’ve decided to join in with the Beer O’Clock Show’s “12 Beers of Christmas”.
Over the course of the next 12 days, Twitter, instagram, untapped and the blogosphere will be awash with what looks to be some great beer… I’m looking forwards to both drinking mine and hearing what everybody else has to say about theirs.
My list, in no particular order at the moment (and possibly subject to change depending on how I feel):
A Berliner Weisse has been on my list of beers to brew for some time now, so with stocks of ‘normal’ beer up to an acceptable level again it’s time to experiment a little!
There’s actually a reasonable amount of information available on the internet, perhaps a little too much in fact. Settling on an approach took a while. Sour mashes, pitching lacto, to boil or not… plenty to research and think about ahead of the brewday.
I’ve had a bag of pale rye burning a hole in my malt store for a few months now, so it was time to make use of it and see what it does. I threw some in the last brew but that was a bit of a random mixture, so this time I’m looking for the rye to stand out more. Carrying on the theme of trying out new ingredients, I’ve also got a bag of Experimental-366 hops that I hadn’t got around to trying either… I’ve heard good things about them so I’m looking forwards to this one.
On to the recipe…
Time for the first brew of 2014 and it’s a bit of a spring clean of the hop and grain stock pile. Turns out I’ve been home brewing since 2009, according to the dates on some of the bags of grain! (EDIT – Not sure where that grain came from?!… my records show my first all-grain brew was March 2011)
So with a few kilos of stale grain and some slightly iffy hops chucked in the bin, I’m still left with some open bags that need using up pretty soon. That can only mean one thing… a ‘use it up brew’ 
Having finally managed to pull together all of the pieces for my kegerator project, yesterday became build day. It turned out to be one of the simpler homebrew projects that I’ve undertaken, but I thought I’d write up a short ‘how to’ just in case it inspires somebody else to have a go.