Right now, I'm excited about brewing. I'm always pretty excited about brewing, but this is special. I'm looking for repsonsible beer adventures. I want to brew styles I haven't brewed before, some of which I've never even tasted. Here are a few things that I'm considering: a barley wine, a dubbel, a wit, an almost altbier. The "almost" in the altbier comes from the fact that I may not be able to give it the traditional conditioning.

Barley wine requires different sorts of preparation and planning than my usual brew because of it's strength. As I was first considering this brew, I was thinking that I would use extract if the gravity did not attain 110. Now I'm thinking that I should insist on making this all-grain for the extra-challenge that that involves. I will probably try to make a more english style barley wine than american style one--high bitterness, but with smaller late hop additions than one would find in the U.S. and I will probably use East Kent Goldings for all the finishing. I was thinking about doing two ounces of warrior hops (~17% AA) for bittering.

Dubbel is a lot of fun. With a Dubbel, one wants complexity. Half the complexity comes from the yeast (I will probably use White Labs Abbey Ale yeast), the other half from the choice of grain--hops to bitter only, and only mildly--which will be somthing like carapils, caravienna, caramunich, special B, aromatic and belgian pils.

Did I say wit? Oh yeah, that will probably be later than the others as it is a warmer weather beer. I will probably not add any spice etc. to this myself. Instead, I will depend on yeast and (slightly irresponisbly) a small measure of american citrusy hops.

The Almost Altbier may be the first of these responsible adventures that I make for this simple reason that it sounds like a winter time beer to me. The classic recipe for this style is 90% pils malt, 10% munich, bittered with spalt hops and having moderate to very low hop aroma, but little or no hop flavor. Since I really want complex malt, I'm going to use more munich malt (20%) and probably add some melanoidin malt as well. SRMs for altbier range from 13-17, so I may need to add something for color. I was thinking about an ounce of de-bittered black malt (caraffe) for this, but I'd rather have a low SRM and no roast character and a roasty altbier. I'm going to do a decoction mash with this beer, so it should be fun to make. I haven't planned exactly how the decoction will go. I want a low mash temperature (149 or 150) so that I hit 78%-80% attenuation and I want to use the decoction to mash-out. And I want to boil the decoction itself for about 30 minutes to get Maillard reactions. It seems rather complicated to make all this come out right.

I should be racking the oatmeal stout today.