What are we brewing next?

You may or may not have noticed that Mike and I have taken a bit of a break from brewing. As a full time special education teacher, the month of April into the beginning of May is an incredibly busy time for me at work. We put a lot of effort and time into preparing for the March 19 Craft Beer LB event, so we needed a little R&R! Also, we wanted to properly spend some time together celebrating our twenty year wedding anniversary! Now that things are slowing back down to normal at work, Mike and I are ready to begin brewing. 

Well, what to brew? What to brew? That seems to be the inevitable question that brewers are constantly asking themselves. We are retiring Judge Hopner IPA for a bit to concentrate on some new recipes. Honestly, I have been researching and writing new ideas for recipes constantly. Some of the recipes may never come to fruition, but I have about 50-60 beer recipes ready to go. I’m currently reading up kettle souring because it is an area I don’t know about and a way to try something new. The theme of this for us to get out of our comfort zone and nothing is more outside my comfort zone than sour beer! But, we have the sour beer on the shelf for a bit as we want to read up on equipment contamination and best practices. 

So, what to brew now? Well….drum roll please…we decided to enter 8 beers (yes, 8…four under my name and 4 under Mike’s name) into the National Homebrew Competition! Yikes! Why? Well, because we decided to attend Homebrew Con that is held in June in Pittsburgh, PA. If by the off chance one of our beers wins a medal, how cool would it be to pick up a medal at Homebrew Con? A girl can dream, right?

Our 8 NHC Beers:

1. Pippy Hopstocking Cold IPA. We entered this in the Specialty IPA category as it is a high IBU beer brewed with lager yeast. We were given good reviews of Pippy at the LB event, so we decided we wanted to get feedback to make this even better. Besides, we really like drinking it! 
2. Haleiwa Island Lager. We entered this as a Pale European Lager. I am super proud of this beer as it is brewed with Jasmine Rice and came out as one of my favorite beers to drink and brew. I was worried that we would have a hard time replicating the rice each time but that hasn’t been the case. 
   
3. Basic Bitch Brown. We entered this in the English Brown Ale category. It is a mild British beer and one of my favorite styles to drink. We named her Basic Bitch because she seems like a simple little recipe, but she is actually quite complex. While I love drinking this beer, I am also constantly second guessing this beer and wondering if I should tweak the recipe or leave it alone. People who love traditional American brown ales don’t really get what I was going for with this recipe, but I have received good feedback from other mild British brown ale drinkers. The feedback should help us decide once and for all to change the recipe or leave it alone. 
   
4. Mouth Mittens Imperial Red. We entered this in the Scottish/Irish Red Ale category. This is a complete redo of a previous version of the recipe and the first time we brewed this beer we served it at the LB contest. I was very proud of this beer, particularly the color. However, we didn't brew this specifically as an Irish red. This is a hoppy beer brewed to what Mike and I like to drink. I’m hoping the feedback from judges will help me to decide whether to make this a true to style Irish red or leave ot as a hoppy red beer.
   
5. Tongue Hug Tropical Stout. We entered this in the tropical stout category. We like to think of Tongue Hug as Mouth Mittens cousin. I have been reading about various British beers and came across articles on tropical stout beers. I have never tasted one and never brewed one. This is an entirely new recipe created because the beer sounds delicious. I love dark British beers and the idea of a drinkable dark beer on a hot summer day sounds amazing to me. I am actually incredibly excited to try this beer out!
   
6. Makani Lager. We entered this with Haleiwa in the Pale European Lager category. This beer is 100% Mike. He wanted to brew a lager that was exactly what he was looking for. We even did a lot of research on various new hops and hope we found the perfect blend of tropical hop flavors for this lager. Makani means breeze in Hawaiian, and Mike wanted this beer to be the perfect hammock drinking beer. 
   
7. Tijuana Facelift. We entered this in the Spiced Beer category. For those that don’t know, Tijuana Facelift was the name of one of Mike’s bands. We wanted to make a Bohemia style lager and spice it up with peppers and blood oranges. The original version we made about 5 years ago was a favorite of our friends. It is surprisingly easy drinking and has a bit of a michelada/bloody mary vibe; it’s a perfect beer to drink for Sunday brunch. However, we made a few changes to the recipe based on how the first version came out which wasn’t 100% in the direction we wanted it to go. We want this to be less Sunday brunch beer and more lazy day drinking beer. 
   
8. Salute Italian Pilsner. We entered this in the Specialty Beer category. For those that don’t know, Mike and I were married in Las Vegas on April 1. One of our favorite things to do in Las Vegas on a hot day is to go to Carmine’s Italian Restaurant in the Shops at Caesar’s Palace and drink a very cold Peroni. If you have never had Peroni, it is perfection in a glass. It is the perfect blend of hops and pilsner malt. It is the one beer that never makes us feel full or heavy which makes it the perfect accompaniment for pasta and the perfect drink on a hot day as it is surprisingly refreshing. We love a good Pilsner, so we wanted to create our perfect Italian style pilsner. Obviously, we put our Two Jacks flare on it. When I wrote the recipe, I did a lot of research on water profiles, malts, and hops. I can almost taste the beer without brewing it…I’m hoping my recipe matches the flavor profile in my head.

Preparing for the NHC

We are super happy that the NHC accepts canned beer! We bought an Oktober canning machine and have a box of cans already, so that’s a huge plus. We also have to submit in six bottles/cans of each beer (that’s 32 total beers!) for judging. Being able to ship the beers in cans versus bottles should, I hope, cost a little bit less. 

We signed up for two competitions and had to mail in bottles for those competitions. Shipping to those locations first helped us to not stress as much for this competition. The fact that we were able to ship bottles to competitions in Oregon and Ohio without any bottles being broken, makes us feel confident that we can get our cans to Pittsburgh without any beer mishaps. Of course, beer can always be stopped en route, but we decided not to stress about what we cannot control. 

Our competition entries are paid for, labels are printed out on Avery labels, and we have all of our shipping supplies in order. In a future blog post, I’ll go over our steps for shipping the beers to competition. I’ll wait until after the beers successfully make it to competition before I post that blog. We don’t need any jinxing! :)

Brew Plan

I f you had asked me in January if we would be sending 8 beers to the National Homebrew Competition, I would have thought you were crazy. Now, it seems kind of normal. Yes, eight beers is a lot, but we really want the feedback and experience of competition. However, since April is such a busy month, brewing eight beers to send fresh batches of every beer seems daunting. Instead, we plan to send our current versions of Mouth Mittens, Basic Bitch Brown, Pippy Hopstocking, and Haleiwa. If for some reason we don't have enough of one of these beers or the beers have developed off flavors for some reason, we will rebrew that one beer. Instead, we are focusing on the other four beers we have yet to brew. We planned ahead for each of these beers. We have the hops and yeast available for everything. The only hiccup is whether or not our homebrew shop has the grains. We have backup plans for the grains. I even have the blood orange puree ready to go for Tijuana Facelift. We did not want to get stuck having the beers ready to brew and miss out on an ingredient. Now, all we can do is hope our recipes are on point and our brew days go well. But, we figure it is a win win. If a brew day goes poorly, we are going to ship the beer anyway and see if how we evaluate the beers matches how the judges view the beers. 

While a win would be nice, we really do hope to get amazing feedback and to learn a lot. We are excited to attend Homebrew Con and hopefully meet many of the brewers we follow on Instagram. We want to perfect the homebrewing craft as much as possible. But, I’m not going to lie. I didn’t play Division I Volleyball and Mike didn’t play minor league baseball because we aren’t competitive. Winning a medal would be amazing and the bragging rights would be awesome. However, we want to make the best beers we can make. We want to expand our brewing processes, try new styles of brewing, and keep pushing the boundaries of what we can do with our brew system. In the process, we want to continually celebrate those brewers that win competitions and learn from those who we have the pleasure of meeting along our journey. 

So, what are you brewing next and why?

Cheers!
2JBC