My hoppy beers are good, but I know they could be better.

I’m pretty sure oxygen exposure is one of the last things making my homebrew IPAs not quite as good as my favorite commercial examples.

To try to improve this, I finally splurged and built a hop dropper from 2” tri-clamp fittings.

For its first test I’m going to brew a hoppy west coast pale ale.

Low-ish alcohol and big-ish flavor are the order of the day. I’m aiming for a sessionable ~5.3% hazy pale ale with lots of hop character.

The hop blend will be an old favorite of mine: amarillo, citra, and simcoe. But for something a little different, I’m going to use all cryo hops.

Happy almost winter! This batch will be an oatmeal stout to test out HBC 472 as a dark beer flavor hop.

472 is a newer hop with some pretty unusual taste descriptors: wood, coconut, vanilla.

I got to try an IPA that was dry hopped with this a little while ago. It was definitely different. I didn’t really get the wood/vanilla but there were some coconut notes. It was a bit odd in IPA form but I thought it might make a good dark beer.

Today’s brew is going to be a pale beer/wine hybrid.

In the past, my approach for combining wine and beer has been to blend finished commercial wine into my beers at a rate between one cup, and a whole bottle in five gallons of beer. Results have been good, but a bit on the subtle side. Today I want to try to make something more wine forward – a real beer/wine hybrid instead of just a beer with a little bit of wine in it.

Whole grapes would be great for this, but that’s a large and expensive purchase. I’m going to need some planning and confidence when I do finally buy a 5 gallon pail of frozen grapes.

Instead of whole grapes, for this batch I’m going to add the undiluted contents of a one gallon (~5 bottles) wine kit a few days into primary.

Eight years ago, Adrienne and I planted hop rhizomes in the corner of her parents garden: cascade, and nugget I think. Since then they’ve been neglected, growing kind of wild. We never trellised or harvested them. I thought they might not survive like this, but they seem to be hardy plants!

This year, a deer fence went up around the garden. The hops climbed all over it and produced an unexpected bounty. With so many hops just sitting there, I decided I’d finally try making a beer with them.

Many of my brewing ideas come from trying a great commercial beer and wanting to replicate its flavors at home. Today’s subject is Sapwood’s The Dragon which used a hop blend that I had never tried before: Mosaic, Nelson Sauvin, and Hallertau Blanc.

Both Nelson Sauvin and Hallertau Blanc are typically described as having wine-like qualities. Nelson Sauvin in particular has a reputation for being very unique, and a bit polarizing. I thought The Dragon was delicious though, so I guess I might be a fan.

This won’t be a clone, just a recipe inspired by the hop blend from the original.

In some unlucky timing, both DIPA variants and the last kolsch all kicked within a couple days of each other this week. An empty kegerator is a sad thing. This is going to be a quick “what do I have on hand?” recipe. Happily, what I have on hand is a buch of citra.

After having NEIPA and DIPA on my hoppy taps for the last few months, I’m in the mood for something easier drinking.

I’m aiming for a nice light pale ale in the low 4% abv, moderate bitterness, and solid hop flavor.

This is batch number two of my IPA experiment series. In the first batch I tested out some new equipment and techniques. The beers were some of the best IPAs I’ve ever made, but they were very hard to tell apart. It felt like I had one beer taking up two taps.

Maybe a bad sign for my motivation for testing small tweaks, but for this round I feel like having a litte fun and brewing two significantly different IPAs just to compare the hop blends.

I have ideas of what hops I like, but it’ll be nice to have two equally fresh beers to taste at the same time.

One of my brewing goals for 2020 is to improve the quality of my IPAs. I feel like this far into the brewing game, I should have a little more to show for it when I make my favorite style. They’re rarely bad, but they don’t wow as often as I’d like.

To that end I’m going to be doing a series of experiments this year where make two similar beers at the same time, with just one variable changed. I hope this will improve my process, one tweak at at time.

For this brew, I’m trying out some new hardware and techniques that I’ll use for the rest of my upcoming experiments.

This beer is the first brew to go into my 15 gallon Dad’s Hat rye whiskey barrel. That barrel is destined for sour solera duty, but first I want to brew a couple of big clean beers to make the most of the barrel’s fresh whiskey character.

This stout is based on a KBS clone recipe from Zymurgy that I first brewed way back in 2013. That was a great beer, and I’m excited to try making it again.