Bottling Day for our APA!

Its always a happy day at the Bloomington Beer Blog when we finally bottle one of our precious creations. Yesterday it was our American Pale Ale that got the royal treatment. We were going for a Three Floyd's homage with this brew, and we're not too far off if our pre-bottle sample is correct.

We love Three Floyd's Brewing company at the Bloomington Beer Blog. I can't tell you how many evenings we've spent sipping on a finely chilled Gumballhead at one of our favorite bars. Its a great beer because it has such a strong hop body that even the worst maintained kegging system does nothing to compromise its flavor. Its become our beer of choice when going out for that very reason. Anyone who has yet to try this delicious brew should immediately rectify this grave injustice.

For our homage, we went a little on the lighter side of Gumballhead. We love mega hopped beer, but sometimes you want something that you can sip all night without feeling like you're in "Clash of the Titans". We still gave it a complete hop profile, its a APA after all, with a more than generous dry hop period to boot. A beer equivalent of the velvet hand/mailed fist metaphor.

Our initial tasting was mostly positive. It was super smooth, with a very nice hoppy aftertaste that came on really gently and subtly until it enveloped our pallets. We've got a little bit of work to do on the overall body, as its a little on the imperceptible side. Hopefully this will fill out with a generous amount of carbonation from the bottling process.

We've got about 2 weeks before we can give you the final word on our latest creation. We'll be bottling the Meade and Barley Wine in the near future as well, not to mention our Indian Pale Ale. I guess we've got quite a roster lined up in the next few weeks. We've also started on the slow and danger-laden path to all grain brewing, so there should be plenty of adventures to share on that subject. Until next time, stay thirsty and celebrate the beautiful summer with a great American Pale Ale.

-The Bloomington Beer Blog.

Smithwick's: Irrefutable proof that a merciful God exists.

Smithwick's may be the best beer in the universe.

Devin and I love to debate frequently, some say incessantly, about almost every topic imaginable. One of our more frequent, not to mention favorite, points of discussion is beer. What brew is best? Why do we like it? The list is endless. One of our favorite beers here at the Bloomington Beer Blog, and Devin's all time favorite, is Smithwick's. An Irish Red that, for all accounts and purposes, may actually be perfect.

Devin said he tried his first Smithwick's at the tender age of fifteen, and it set his standard for beer from that point onwards. Other than the glaring problem that legally he could only have sampled Smithwick's in the African country of Comoros at that time, there is a lot of truth to that statement. It is one of the most balanced and well crafted beers on the market today.

One of the bywords of the Irish Red Ale style is balance. An even balance of hops to malt, a creamy head to smooth out the flavor, and subtle blend of specialty grains, is the norm for a Red. Smithwick's, however, takes it to the next level.

If Irish Reds are smooth, than Smithwick's is the Casanova of the bunch. With a slightly larger malt body than most Reds, and a hearty infusion of nitrogen carbonation for smoothness, Smithwick's almost melts in your mouth. Served at the proper temperature, it induces religious experiences. It cleanses the pallet and renews the soul. Its just that good.

One note of precaution with this glorious beer: Its best from the tap, but more consistent from the bottle. In fact, we believe that if Smithwick's tasted more consistent on tap from bar to bar, it would be far more popular than it is already. The delicate balance of flavors are easily spoiled by uncleaned keg tubing, or other faulty bar maintenance; its the beer equivalent of a canary in a coalmine. Since it can't hide any incompetence, its one of the best ways to judge the quality of a bar, and you'll be amazed how many bars come up short.

In our latest scientific study, what we like to call our bar crawls, we found that only one of our local bars served a respectable pint of our favorite Red, The Irish Lion. That's pretty impressive since Bloomington is a college town where drinking borders on being the state-sponsored religion. We must drink so much that taking any time out to clean the keg system would be bad for business. Regardless of the reason, the difference is staggering and must be tasted to be believed. Don't take our word for it, go out to your favorite bars and taste for yourselves. We'd like nothing more than to be proven wrong. After all, one more bar that serves a refreshing pint of Smithwick's from the tap is a step towards a better world for all of us.

Until next time,

-The Bloomington Beer Blog.

Racking Day

Greetings from beer country,
A lot has been going on today in our beer world. Scott has been making some great strides in the science/art of kegging homebrew. We've also gotten our calendar together as well, so you can follow our beer's schedules and events we are hosting/attending.

We're so proud of our new Cornelius kegging system, which Scott procured from the local home brew store. We messed up  and over-oxidized the Stout when kegging, but its a mixed blessing cause it give us incentive to drink it faster.

 Our Racking of our IPA went smoothly. The smell that greeted us opon opening our fermentation bucket was pleasant and without off flavors. We then dry-hopped an ounce of East Kent Goldings, with a 4.6 alpha acid percentage. We'll be doing secondary fermentation for about two weeks, then one more week for bottling (since we only have one keg) before we can give you our review.

In other news, we are planning to start a new side project. Its going to be a slightly sweet, sparkly clean version of an Irish red. We're aiming for around 6% abv, and going for a clean, multi-tiered flavor profile. This is going to be our first project with our all grain brewing setup we expect to be starting up in the near future. The working title is "Red-Headed Stepchild", owing to the offbeat combination of styles, but it may change in the future.


The beer tasting we mentioned before might be delayed until next weekend, owing to some scheduling issues, but that should give anyone who wants to voice their opinion on our sample list to get their preferences heard. We should be back soon with another exciting update on our next brew day.

Stay thirsty fellow brewers,
-Bloomington Beer Bloggers.

Upcoming Beer Tasting.

Hello from Beer Country,
One of my fellow brew buddies and I were having a delicious meal at taco bell today, and came upon a wonderful idea. We've always been interested in converting our day to day activities into something productive and fun, so we decided that instead of just having a simple housewarming party to celebrate his new apartment, we could turn an otherwise normal night of drinking and conversation into an event.

My idea was to get everybody to bring their favorite micro-brewed beer and make the housewarming into a beer tasting event. Being the kind of person who loves to analyze and tabulate everything I come across, it only seemed natural to turn the time-honored tradition of BYOB into a tasting contest. It would also give us the opportunity to pit our most recent malty concoction against the established brews popular amongst our friends.

The tasting is going on this weekend, so please comment on this post or send me an email if there is any regional beer that you think we need to include. Also, the poll on our blog will be wrapping up then, so we will make sure to include a good representative from the category that wins.

Until next time,
-The Bloomington Beer Blog.

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.