Saturday, April 09, 2011

Prepping for brew day

Stopped by BrewTensils this morning to prep for my DCP homebrew feature and to pick up ingredients for tomorrow's brew session. Good talk with Darren Link, BrewTensil's manager, about the community aspect of brewing, and with Mike Schwartz, Belmont/BrewTensils owner about upcoming events. Also met several all-grain brewers at the Belmont brewout. Good group.

Trying a few new things tomorrow. Going for an all-grain RyePA. We'll see how gummy malted rye really is. I picked up some rice hulls--hopefully that will help. This will only be my second IPA, despite over a decade of brewing (the first was a Victory HopDevil clone and my first partial grain).

At Jim Witmer's advice, I also picked up 5.2 mash stabilizer--buffering salts so that I don't have to muck with pH levels. Heard that I'll see better efficiency rates. That's great, but I'm happy just to not have to worry about the pH level.

Finally, trying dry yeast for the first time since my first brew. Built up a starter using Goya Malta - the hop and malt based soda. We'll see how it goes. More notes tomorrow.