I have only ever brewed alone, so it was a little strange, but also refreshing to share the duties. I paired with my brewther Calvin. Last year both of us placed in a homebrew competition called Go For The Glory. With that in mind, we decided to use our award winning recipes as a base for our collabrewation Pale Ale. We have dubbed it "Went For The Glory". The other pairing was Calvin's usual co-brewer Peter, AKA Hobbs, and Mike, AKA Professor Vorlauf. They brewed a Dusseldorf Altbier that they have named "Oh Meine Leber", which translates to, "Oh My Liver"
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| Calvin, The Prof., Hobbs and Me. I'm stirring water that I allowed to get hotter than I wanted. I seem to do that nearly every time I brew. Maybe I should install a thermometer in my kettle, or I can just plan on extra stirring; either way. |
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| Cal & I doughing in. Doughing in is the process of adding hot water to the grain in stages. Some grain, some hot water, then some more grain and then some more hot water, etc... until all of the grain and the calculated water volume has been added to the mash tun (that would be the cooler) |
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| Kelfie (kettle selfie). This was taken after the collection of the first runnings which went much faster than the second, but not as fast as Cool Runnings |
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| Hobbs is very excited about this hop addition. That mesh is there to keep ash from the pallet fire, err I mean fire pit out of the kettle |
The brew day lasted a bit longer than I had anticipated, but it went well. We were a little low in the temperature of our mash due to my guesstimations, but that was simple to correct with a small amount of boiling water. We hit the targeted original gravity and have a lovely active fermentation going as I type. In a few weeks Cal and I will bottle our batch of beer and then after a few weeks of bottle conditioning, we get to say that we "Went For The Glory".
Cheers!
