International Homebrew Project 2013

Oh, The International Homebrew Project 2013... I have been looking forward to doing this as soon as I heard about it. Especially since I missed out on a few years in the past. I thought that this year was even more perfect due to the fact that I have always wanted to brew a Burton ale... well, at least in current history and that is what was on tap for this years IHP.

The recipe was pretty simple, which lead me to believe that this would be a very simple brewday... sometimes I should just shut my big mouth when these things are going down. It honestly started great, but as time when on, oh, as time went on.

I have been wanting to make the move from pellet hops to leaf hops and since I found a good deal on Cluster, and I needed a ton of it, I picked it up and decided this would be my first step toward that switch.

There is nothing wrong with Pellet Hops, I have used them ever since I started brewing in 2009. I just love the look, feel, and smell of Leaf Hops. That was essentially what made this decision for me.

At first, I was just going to throw the hops in there without any kind of filter. When I first started brewing I used cheese cloth to contain my pellet hops but after time found it was unnecessary and just threw them directly into the kettle. I was told time and time again that this was a bad idea for this batch and I was going to ignore that advice but I had some cheese cloth lying around from way back when, so I decided to use it.



But anyway, maybe I should take a few steps back since there were some issues with this brewday. The Mash. Pretty simple and straight forward for this beer, but sometimes even that could go wrong. This was what I saw after I mashed in and everything seemed to be going so smooth, yeah, so smooth.



When I went to collect my runnings, the drainage tube immediately filled up with grains. I had no idea what was going on but I had my suspicions being this has happened to me before... and I was right. My hose braid came loose.



And that is not where my issues decided to end. After I got the boil rolling, I went inside and who knows what the hell I did... probably got on twitter, but who knows. I go back out to check on it and the boil has significantly slowed... I tried to turn up to heat to get it going faster and nothing... The flame decided to die out. I grabbed my other tank and then remembered, "Crap! I did not refill this one either!!!"... So now, I was faced with having no idea how to restart the boil and account for the time being I had already done my first hop addition...



Total fail to this point... and it sucks even more. With everything that has been going on recently, I ended up failing at completing the task... The beer is brewed, fermented out and everything but I have just been able to find the time to bottle it, keg it, or taste it... Still sitting in the fermenter... Though, this weekend may be the one. I should actually have time to brew and bottle up the remainder of one of my kegs and throw this one in there... and then I won't be able to touch anything until I get home in June... Woooo for out of state job training...

I will drop updates for this soon. I will probably do tasting notes of the post fermented beer tomorrow and add them here. Kind of missed the point of IHP but I really could not do anything about it...

Cheers!