I spend a significant part of yesterday cleaning and rearranging Next Week Brewery.

I feel as though the nextweek brewery has gotten tired and stagnant. A conservatism about beer and brewing has set in. When I open the recipe book to brew, it feels as though the question is whether the only question is: English or American, and how dark? While I think that this is a great question, it's not the only question. Brewing is--or at least should be--as much about discovery as success. I've spent too much time trying to brew outstanding paradigmatic beers and not enough trying to make something new. Innovation is not to be valued for it's sake, but for the sake of discovering something good.

It's time to make four beers unlike the beers I've made before, in hope of discovering something good.

Here are the four beers that I'm going to make, probably interspersed with some more traditional beers:

Cedar Amber Ale: an amber ale on the malty side of balance, probably actually without significant hop aroma or flavor, moderate bitterness (25 IBU) and a blend of crystal malt. Racked to secondary with 3 oz. of cedar chips. Hence, cedar amber ale. Cedar is poisonous. I'm not really sure how poisonous. On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is non-toxic and 1 is as toxic as ethyl alcohol, I don't want anything that's a 2 or higher in my beer.

A sour ale. I don't want it to be too sour, but I'm thinking some sourness for the balance will be fun. I haven't decided what kind of sour ale I'm going to do, but I'm going to do one. I'll mash and sparge and then chill the wort to around 100 degrees. To that I will add half a pound of crushed grain and let it rest over night. I'll boil and pitch the next day. Papazian and some others I like have recommended this for making sour ale.

A fruit beer. Probably, raspberry and wheat.

Industrial Revolution porter. 1/3 base malt, 1/3 amber malt, 1/3 brown malt. O.G. 60. 40-50 I.B.U. (maybe and ounce of German Northern Brewer), but not much hop aroma or flavor.

I racked these two beers today:

I'm going to start naming my beers again. The one on the left is called "IPA Prime", because it is the second IPA that follows more-or-less a model that I liked earlier this year. The one on the right is called "Never Use Progress Hops" after the fucking awful flavor that the progess hops, upon racking, appear to have put in the beer. It tastes like hell and I think I'm brewing this week to make up for it.

Also worth mentioning is that IPA Prime is the underattenuated beer that I struggled with so much. It finally hit a gravity of 17, which isn't so bad, but it's nowhere near the level of attenuation I'd hoped for. The beer will be fine, but merely fine.

On the lighter side, the blond and the pale ale that I kegged yesterday at 100% promising. I'm naming them Firefly Blond and Early Summer Pale. Firefly I won't go into; Early Summer because of the time and the hops, Chinook, which is a word for a weird warm wind that sometimes appears in winter and spring in the rocky mountain states like montana.

A little while ago I linked to a nice discussion of session beer on a blog that is obvious a better beer blog than this one is. Continuing in the tradition of better blogs: here's one. Well, that's actually a link to his article on nearly puking some bad danish lager into which he put some spoiled hop extract. Well, he thinks it might have been hop extract. I'm not sure from what he says that he's confident that it was really hop extract. The blog, anyway, appears far more worth reading than this one.

The recent pale ale blasted its way through fermentation and it ready to keg. I'm leaving town early tomorrow for my mother's 60th birthday and won't have time to keg it until I return, which is too bad because it would be nice to come home to some ready-to-drink pale ale. (What I tasted when I racked this beer was incredible.--More on making incredible beer in a moment.)

The blond will also be ready to keg soon, likely I will keg that along with the pale ale on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to the blond, but I can't say too much about it yet because when I rack it has some sulfur flavors that will no doubt dissipate during conditioning. (Sulfur smells and tastes, I have found, unlike all the other undesirable smells and tastes I've accidentally brewed up, actually disspate during conditioning.)

There's that IPA that underattenuated and I got going again. I'm sorta worried about that beer because I dumped so much yeast on it to get it to continue fermenting. The future of that beer: probably re-rack it, dry-hop it and add some fining to remove the yeast. I wasn't planning originally to dry hop it, but since I'll have two other beers ready around the time I return, I think I will.

And there's that damned old ale that I haven't done anything about since I racked it, except move it to a keg so that i can beer-gun it into bottles.

In case your counting, that makes 25 gallons--5 batches--of beer sitting around and waiting to be packaged...

Back to the topic of making incredible beer. If what I've tasted while racking is any indication, I've been rewarded for having made two funny-yeast beers in a row. The Old Ale that I moved to a corney keg has amazing potential. And the recent Pale Ale may be the best pale ale I've ever made. I suspect that carastan malt is the secret to great pale. The IPA, though underattenuated, was full of promise. The amber ferments and when I get back I'll find out how good it is.

Remember my amber ale project?

Well, I'm finally actually making another amber ale.

Here's the recipe:

7 lbs. maris otter
1.5 lbs Cargil 2-row
.5 lb. wheat
.5 lb. 10L crystal
.38 lb. 80L crystal
.25 lb. special B

mashed at... I haven't decided for sure, though I think well-attenuated is what I want, especially given that I'll be pitching Pacific Ale yeast, which doesn't attenuate greatly. I may try a tiny step mash, like 20 minutes at 145 followed by 30 at 155 or something like that. I have a thought on how to make such a thing happen that I'm pretty fond of: heat additional water for the initial infusion, remove additional water and heat to a temperature good for the infusion.

For hops, I'm using half an ounce of Chinook, (up to) 1 oz. fuggles for flavor and (up to) one ounce cascade for aroma. I'll probably use a full ounce for each. Fuggles is not a strong hop and I like the smell of cascade hops.

Pacific Ale yeast.

Now, if you read the old plans regard this amber ale project, you can look at this an conclude that it's not really a part of the project. There's some similarity in the grain bill (dark crystals) and that about it.

I know what I'm doing today.

Later, an update:

Or not. Turns out cheap pressure cookers are more than I imagined.

This would certainly get me back on a step mashing kick, and I'm especially fond of the method as it seems much less apt to caramelize sugars than, for example, direct heat.

I hate it when I run out of homebrew. This happens every now and then and it drives me nuts. I'm not actually out right now, but I like to have an english or american ale on hand pretty much at all times. and right now I have only hefe.

I made that IPA, which would have been nearly ready by today if the fermentation hadn't stalled out at 1.024. Argh! I tried putting two packets of Fermentis Safale US Ale yeast in and nothing happened. Then I split a vial of WLP001 into two starters, one of which went into an american pale that I made yesterday (more on that in a moment) and one of which went into the IPA. This kicked it back up and I had a bubble every 15 seconds in the airlock yesterday. Today is slower: every 40 seconds, but I got at least 24 hours of fermentation from the Cali ale yeast, so that should have moved the gravity down a fair bit. I'm sure that will help, even if I don't get the well attenuated IPA I had hoped for.

There's another ale ready to be racked right now. It's a blond ale the recipe for which is basically a pils, but fermented with california V ale yeast. I'm hoping that vial of california yeast did a bettter job than the one in my IPA. If not, I won't be doing cali V ale yeast again for awhile. I should rack that today, but it's very cloudy, so I can't be sure how long it will be before I keg it.

Yesterday's pale ale was maris otter and carastan, 9lbs and 1lb. respectively, mashed at 152 for an hour; Bittered with .75 oz. chinook for 60, .25 oz. chinook for 30 and an ounce of atanhum at knockout. The other half of that california ale yeast mentioned above went into that fermenter. I bollocksed everything up by forgetting the pH stabilizer and so I added some of that at the end of an hour and bumped the temp to 155 for 20 to make sure that it got all converted. It's a tornado inside that fermenter, so something happened right.

I'm also going to keg my old ale today. If it tastes good. There's mold in the airlock.