Raleigh Brewing Company

As some of you may know, I entered my Fat Bastard Barley Wine into a competition last year, The Piedmont Brewers Cup. It actually did fairly well, scoring 43 points out of a possible 50 total, and it took first in the strong ale category. I was not able to make it to the award ceremony they were holding but I figured I would get my feedback in the mail and see what the judges thought of it. I mean, this was my first, first place finish so I was excited!

After some time had passed and I had not heard back I figured I would email the runners of the competition and just ask if there were any problems or anything. I got in contact with John at that time and apparently some things went down and yada yada yada… I am sure you get the picture. Anyway, he moved onto another project. He started another competition and even began to open a brewery! The Raleigh Brewing Company. Their website says it was actually formed back in 2010 but really, what could be more exciting than that?! I knew I had to get up there. I just needed to figure out when it was going to be opening.

Lucky for me, they have a homebrew shop on site! The Atlantic Brew Supply. I figured I would go up there, pick up some supplies, find out about everything that is going on, and when I could come and try out all of their beers. Simple enough list, right? The supply shop is in a pretty big area and they have everything I could have thought to pick up. I wanted a little container of PBW and I was expecting the standard, biggest size we have 4lb container… They had an 8! I was not picking up a complicated amount of supplies or anything out of the ordinary but they had everything I was looking for and more. Very nicely sorted and staged. If you could not find something, you were not really looking.

After I had checked out I went around meeting the crew and got to talking with everybody that was there about pretty much everything. I had some heart felt moments with Patrik, a short chat about the brewery and the opening with the ever so busy John, I got some good advice on my Bavarian Wheat from Eddie, and talked about dogs with Alex. It was a pretty awesome time and at one point, John brought me out a sample of the official, very first beer of the company, The Raleigh UN-Common.

This beer was an experiment that went extremely well and has been called our “Gateway Beer”. If you aren’t sure what to drink or don’t like beers that are very rich in flavor, bitterness, or alcohol then our Raleigh UN-Common is for you! It’s very light in both color and flavor, finishes crisp, and is low in hop bitterness. However, there are still hints of cereal and toast to keep it interesting and it’s brewed with a lager yeast. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do! 4.5% ABV

The Un-Common was only about 40 hours post yeast pitch and John said that the beer had dropped about 10 gravity points from its 1.050 Original Gravity. John then told me that I was The Very First to have a sample of their production beer! I can totally say that I have been here since the beginning! Now if there were only an Untappd badge for that… I wish I snapped a picture of it as well hah!

At this time the beer was grainy, had a fairly nice body even though it was early in fermentation, and it was lemony on the finish. I can’t wait to try this one once it is done. It may very well end up being my first beer from them. That way I can see the change along the fermentation process.

I had a little bit of an ethical dilemma after I finished the beer. John had given it to me in a Raleigh Brewing Company glass and I wanted it! I drank the beer inside of the glass and I was thinking to myself, “Is this glass for me?” Haha! I really wanted it but I just left it there. I had already checked out, I was “on my way out”, I thought maybe I should have asked, or just picked one up since they had a lot of merchandise with their name on it. Oh well, next time. I can see one of those growlers coming home with me.

I am really interested in trying the English Bitter, a true session ale and the Rye IPA just because I love brewing with Rye. That is actually one of the ingredients I picked up from Atlantic Brew Supply. A few things I found out that may be of importance or just something to satisfy your curiosity,

The Raleigh Brewing Company is brewing on a 20 barrel system.

That is about 630 gallons of beer each batch. That is pretty insane. I only make 5 gallons in each batch I make… Yeah!

It sounds like they plan to open the doors to the tap room on March 2nd.

I am not sure if that is The Date, so don’t come after me if you are in the area then and it is not. There should be an update on their website soon. If you are in the area though, you should definitely check it out. I know I will be up there.

L’s Ales: Summer Starlifter

So, I have a little bit of a back log of post I need to get out due to my work schedule, but I am taking a break to get a few out there. I am still working on my visit to a few breweries, including New Belgium & The Duck Rabbit Brewery. New Belgium was the most heavenly of trips, but you will hear about that soon. I recently got to take a part in Iron Brewer. A few of my tweeps have taken part in it before and I was jealous that they got to take part and I missed out. I was pretty disappointed when I found out that I missed Round 1 sign up for Batch 3 but was ecstatic as soon as I found out Round 2 sign ups were going out! This really excited me because it would be my first brew in about a year. I have missed so much about it and this is a great opportunity to get some feedback from complete strangers.

Iron Brewer is really just an opportunity to challenge yourself to make a beer using ingredients that you might not normally use. They give you 3 ingredients and that is about it… they let you decide on your style and recipe on your own. The point is to be creative and make something that you think will stand out and compliment the given ingredients. I thought the ingredients for my round were a little uninspired but that is where the challenge comes from. I was to use Crystal 120, White Wheat Malt, and Faulkners Flight Hops. I thought the other rounds had a better set up but I was not going to let this put me down. My initial reaction was, “I always wanted to brew a hefe”, so I got started on writing that recipe. It was after I went to bed and woke up that I realized that sure, I could do something interesting with the style but that kind of goes against what the competition was about. Originality. Given my list, nothing was original about that. Then I got to thinking and this is where it all starts again. The obsession picks back up and the madness goes completely out of control… I love it… I decided to brew a session ale for the summer. The Saison is always a style I wanted to brew but have never done so. I thought this would work out perfectly. I wrote up the recipe and quickly started getting everything together in order to do it… I also quickly remembered why I wanted to upgrade my equipment.

I am tired of my corona mill. It gets the job done but I am glad this was a fairly small batch. This is one of the most annoying tools in my arsenal. I totally works and I get great efficiency from my crush but the amount of time and energy it takes to do so is questionable at some points. Like back when I brewed my Fat Bastard Barley Wine. About 25lbs of grain in this beer, all crushed with the corona. It sucked. I had made my starter a few days before and once I got the brew going I decided to sample the beer it produced. I figured this would give me an idea of what this yeast is capable of, even though the ingredients going into the beer are nothing like that of just a base malt. Granted it was not carbonated but it was quite a treat. I ended up drinking a whole glass of it just because it was that good. Who would have thought that a starter would be something that I would want several bottles of.

I actually did 2 brew days for this beer. The first was a pilot batch of the same recipe just because I was worried about not having had used my equipment in a while and possible infection. I brewed them 3 days apart and both brew days went surprisingly well. The first had a few issues, but nothing too major. Just problems hitting my first few mash temps. I just had to adjust and move on. I should not have done such a complicated schedule. I usually do a single step mash and have great results and always hit the temp. I guess I was worried about nothing. The wort came up a little short but in my second batch, that was not an issue at all. Then again, what could be bad about having 10 gallons of a Sessionable Saison around your house? Again, this was my first attempt at one so that was kind of scary all in its own.

The final product. I cannot wait to taste it out of the fermenter and get everyone elses feed back as well. I’ll throw some notes up here soon enough. Really excited to be brewing again. Though, I had a major problem with flys on both brew days. I wonder if that an east coast thing because I have never seen so many in all of my days of brewing. Anyway, take a look at that.

Cheers!

1001 Beers: Pliny The Elder

Beer Number 12: Pliny The Elder

Ok, so this picture is not the one I took… I think my phone deleted it haha but it is one that Louie took and he is the one who gave me this beer… and all the others that we drank together this night. I haven’t seen them in almost a year and I am glad we got to catch up before I left town again. We did a little BBQ’n, Drinkin’, and fun havin’. A great night… even though we all almost passed out from sleepyness. Louie had some very interesting beers and actually one that I was looking for, which was pretty surprising being they do not release it often. I guess he has been holding onto it for some time.

Pliny is one of the best IPA’s I have ever tasted. I had it before and even brought home a growler of it. This is another beer that is hard to explain. Everything about this one is just amazing. Piney, Cirtusy, very clean bitterness and flavor but not overdone in anyway. Just perfect and amazing. There were some intersting facts in the book about this beer. Things I did not know.

Vinnie Cilurzo started Blind Pig Brewing, Started the Double IPA Revolution basically to cover up any off flavors in a beer because thier equipment was not the greatest, He originally aged the beer on oak for nine months, served it on the brewery’s first anniversary, took it to the GABF, continued to make the beer annually until he left to brew at Russian River, and then created a new recipe and scaled it up, then named the beer after a Roman Scholar who created the Botanical Name For Hops! Anyway though, lets get to some other brews.

Next Louie broke out the Knuckle Sandwich from Bootleggers. I have never had this one before. I just missed it when I went to the brewery. I was not a fan of anything they had on tap but their bottled beers tend to be really tasty. I am not sure how that process works… maybe the brewery is just dirty. Knuckle Sandwich was very mellow for what I was expecting… maybe not mellow, but it was malty and bitter. I was expecting a thin hop bomb. I really loved it. I will find it again someday.

Next the Imperial Black Phoenix came out. The original Black Phoenix is my favorite beer from the brewery. Again, in bottles! The Imperial version was very interesting. It was very Toasty… Check out the picture.

The Bruery released a beer called Filmishmish and I love the name of it. I loved the beer too. A very good sour brewed with apricots. You could pick them out in the beer and the sourness was very mellow. I am a fan of big sours but this one was well done and it is nice to change taste the range.

So we were looking at various things on Louies computer over the course of the night and when all the windows were closed I saw a picture of Victory At Sea Coffee Vanilla Imperial Porter and I got so excited. I have been wanting to try that beer ever since I first heard of it and I asked him if he has ever had it. Louie looked at me and was like, yeah… Hold on… He walks into the back and comes back with a bottle and throws it in the fridge! That was pretty intense, you have no idea. I know I am easily excited by beer but just the randomness of him having it blew my mind. I loved it! I love Ballast Point. He actually gave me a bottle of Sea Monster & Westvleteren 12 before I left as well. He is very good at finding amazing beers.

After this we popped open one of the bottles of my homebrew that I brought over for him. It was my Fat Bastard BarleyWine… pretty much the only beer I have left being I have not brewed in a long time. I built this beer to age and last the test of time. I am hoping that it fairs well for years to come. We will see for sure. This was my second taste of the beer since it has been bottled. The first was in December, and the second was now. It is coming along really nicely. I am going to open up a bottle for review soon but it turned out very well, I’d say.

989 Bottles Of Beer To Go!

Cheers!

Fat Bastard Barley Wine

I think this is one of my first post about my own homebrew. Wow, I cannot believe that being I have been doing it for over 2 years now… then again, I started this blog after I took a little hiatus from brewing and have been going on a commercial drinking spree since.

Well, so I will now tell you about Fat Bastard Barley Wine… yeahhhhhh…, I guess there isn’t really much to tell. I wanted to brew a Barley Wine, So I did. I wrote up the recipe around Christmas 2010. It was a very simple recipe pretty much 20lbs of 2 row, a bit of Crystal 120, and maybe some Special B, hopped with Sterling and… Magnum? The reason I question all of this is because I wrote the recipe into Beer Smith and then my computer crashed and I lost EVERYTHING!!!!

I was pissed at the time but everything is all good. I am not too pissed about it. I remember that I wanted to keep the recipe simple and I wrote the hopping schedule down in a notebook that is currently in storage… why I did not write the full recipe, I do not know. But I plan to recreate this brew, especially after taking my first sip of it almost a year later.

This was like the perfect Barley Wine! Ok, I will let others be the judge of that but it is exactly what I hoping for especially after I was super worried about carbonation, infection, I guess all the things brewers are ever worried about. Others who have tasted it in the early stages loved it but we agreed that it was way too young at the time. Just the fact that this brew was in the fermenters for the better part of a year and then in bottles for another 4 months without being touched just really freaked me out.

The carbonation level on this brew was perfect, there were no off flavors or anything that would discourage me from drinking this ale. The nose pretty much burned any hairs I had in there but with an ale that is sitting around 12%, what can I expect? Just perfect. I may crack open another bottle before I leave for proper tasting notes but I still want to give this one some time, especially being that I only have 2 more bottles with me and all the rest from the batch are in storage because I figured that would give me most room in the car on the road trip up here and it would keep me from being tempted to drink them without letting it reach its full potential.

I love the color.

If I post the tasting notes look for them here or just come back here in 6 months or so when I have the opportunity to get back into it and I will be out of training so I can actually crack one open and write about it as I am experiencing it. For now just enjoy these pics and know that I was very, Very happy with the outcome.

I said Hooah!