Tag Archives: homebrew

Hops dried and ready to bag

The title pretty much says it. The hops cones are in from the oast house and ready for packing into 2oz food saver packs.

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Hops Harvest

Yesterday evening we harvested our hops. Both the Willamette and Nugget grew more vigorously this year. I gave them a better support structure than last year and didn’t have any trouble with them toppling over this time. The bines were … Continue reading

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Beer and cider

I’ve finally converted a portion of this year’s backyard hops harvest into a fresh hop IPA. The batch I made last fall had a bunch of issues, but a year’s worth of thinking about how to not repeat them seems … Continue reading

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13oz of sticky green

The Willamette Hops has spent a few days in the makeshift oast house (aka hot August garage plus small electric fan). I’ve harvested the Nugget Hops this evening and am starting the process with it. The Willamette turned out to … Continue reading

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Hops Harvesting

The picture hardly does it justice but we pulled in a huge Willamette hops harvest today fearing a thunderstorm this evening.

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Attempting hard apple cider

On Sunday we bought from our local apple farm between 40 and 45 pounds of apples (30+ Gravenstein, 10+ McIntosh) to press. And we have directions, yeast, nutrients and sulfites from our favorite local brewing supply store, Main Brew. Pretty … Continue reading

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Dark beers

After a full day working on the chicken run (fence almost completes) and coop (just needs doors and roof shingles) it seemed like a good reason to pop open some special beers: two bourbon barrel aged and two chocolate/coffee porters. … Continue reading

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Chocolate Espresso Stout

Today I’ve moved our fourth batch of chocolate stout into its secondary fermentation. The first batch was more of a porter. The second was solid, especially after about 10months of bottle conditioning. The third batch was excellent from the beginning, … Continue reading

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Spring beer brewing finally done

We bottle the chocolate stout last night and racked the bitter over into a keg. Both sampled quite well. My benchmark tends to be if room temperature and flat tastes good then cold and carbonated will also. And both of … Continue reading

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Some vines for the back fence

Today I took a break from work and planted the hops. I still need to rig up something for it to climb on, but in the meantime it is in the ground and will hopefully take. It’ll be really interesting … Continue reading

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