Beer Legs

A lot has happened since my last post. That must mean that I’m slacking on this blog.

Anyhoo. I’ve run a couple 5Ks. Good times overall. I came a few seconds shy of my 21 minute goal for the Bucktown 5K. And I’m down to 9 days until my marathon. I’ll be honest with you all, I’m tired of running for a purpose. I can’t wait until the marathon is behind me and I can just head out for a run just for the sake of running… and clearing my head… and enjoying the beautiful autumn weather. I’ll also get to bike a bit more. I haven’t touched my road bike all year. It’s sad, really.

In brewing news, I did my first group/team brew last weekend. It was a lot of fun, even if I was running on less than 3 hours sleep (I had a Dick Prall show in Rock Island the night before). It was also my first all-grain brew. We designed an English Brown Ale. I’ll be racking it to secondary this afternoon. We’re throwing in some oak chips. They may or may not add much, but it’ll be an interesting experiment.

I finally bottled my Belgians. The Orval clone isn’t very clean. A lot of hop trub was still in suspension, and I fear that it may end up tasting a bit “stemmy.” I’ll just give it lots of time to settle. 2 or 3 months maybe? My Belgian Dubbel, on the other hand, looks awesome. That baby will be delicious. I can hardly wait for it to carbonate.

Next Tuesday a friend is coming over to do some brewing. I’ve put together a nice Special Bitter recipe and will be tackling the all grain process on my own—not completely solo, but my friend has never done any brewing, so close enough. Here’s the recipe:

8.0 lb Pale Ale Malt
1.0 lb Munich 10L Malt
1.0 lb Caramel Malt 40L
0.5 oz Nugget (12.9%) – 60.0 min
0.67 oz Fuggle (4.9%) – 35.0 min
1.0 oz Strisselspalt (2%) – 7.0 min
WYeast 1968 London ESB Ale

I have no idea what my mash efficiency is going to be, so I’m going to buy some crystal malt to steep in the kettle if I need to make up any gravity points, or if the taste and color aren’t quite there. This’ll be fun.