Greetings from Beer Country!

Hi all,
I'm super excited to finally share our  Bloomington Brewing adventures with the internet audience at large. We're three friends living in the small Indiana town of Bloomington, and we decided to deal with the pressures of small town living with near constant brewing. We've really been upping the ante as of late on our little brewing operation. We went from three five-gallon buckets to twice that in the last month, and have purchased our first keg and Co2 pressurizing system only a week ago, not to mention a plethora of new ingredients that currently take up about half of my fridge. All told, we're waiting on about 25 gallons of new brews in a variety of fun styles.

Right now, we have 5 different styles bubbling. A robust and multifaceted Barley Wine, a complex Coffee and Vanilla Stout, A Three Floyds homage IPA, as well as a more straight ahead Pale Ale, and, finally, a Raspberry Meade. We're super excited about all of them, but the Barley Wine in particular shows special promise. Even the samples we took after our rack already showed a complexity of flavor and boldness not found in our previous brews. Might just be the doting of an over-proud brewer, but we have a really good feeling about it.

So far, only one of our brave new beers has seen the light of day. The stout was the first to finish and had the distinct honor of being our first kegged beer. This was one of our more experimental batches, and we may have been a little overzealous with our flavor complexity.

The overall mouthfeel left something to be desired, a hard feat for a stout, but it was more than compensated by the APV, which turned out to be 7% in the final product. The main body of the beer was, I think, the strong suit of the stout; the vanilla and the malt profile was delicious, but only until the acidity of the espresso flavor aftertaste overpowered the subtlety of the ingredient balance. Bold and innovative experiment, but we'll most likely need a few more test runs before we get all the divergent flavors to work harmoniously.

I'll set up a page in the next few days with some choice bits from our tome of beer recipes, topics in Ethenol & Sucrose. I think it would be fun to get some beer community commentary going on some of our more off-color beer recipes, and stay tuned for write-ups of future homebrews and musings on our favorite liquid pastime.

Happy Drinking,

-Bloomington Beer Bloggers.