With HomebrewCon (formerly the National Homebrewers Conference) fast approaching, it’s time to make some beer to bring. This will be my third year attending the conference, but first outside of San Diego. It’ll actualy be my first time attending when I’m in town entirely for the purpose of the conference, so it should be a slightly different experience than I’ve had before.
My homebrew club, the AABG, decided to do pick a theme for this year’s HomebrewCon club night and we chose session beers. For the purposes of the booth, we’re defining this as anything below 4.5% with the except of a possible session mead or two clocking in at around 6%, which seems fitting. Since many of my recipes fall into this area, I figured I needed to put up a strong showing, so I decided to make my favourite and best low abv beer, Gremlyn’s Mild, and remake my most recent sessionable success, the Golden Ale.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much beer fermenting all at one time!
Mild on the left, Tripel on the right.
Gremlyn’s Mild
For as popular as this beer and recipe have been with both drinkers and brewers, and for as much as I love it, I have not actually brewed it as many times as I probably should over the year. This is probably due to my intermittent breaks from brewing for various reasons, but I say that changes now!
Up until now I had not actually made the mild without something going wrong, whether I missed the mash temp, accidentally added my volume in gallons when it should have been quarts, completely missed the mark on gravity, etc. Happily I can report that last night’s brew session went without a hitch, I was a point or two over on gravity, but I’ll happily take that as the only negative. As a side bonus, I’ll be needing a lot of WLP023 in the next month or so, and the mild is a great beer to harvest from since it’s basically a massive starter strength. I’ll be able to harvest, wash, and reuse the yeast for my upcoming Stout, Golden Ale, and Burton Ale! If I can harvest enough, I may even be able to stretch it further.
Golden Ale
I’ll be brewing this up in a couple of weeks, figuring that being more highly hopped it would be best to have this as fresh as possible for HomebrewCon. I’m making a couple of small tweaks to the recipe; the first is to the grain bill, and the second to the hop schedule. Although I think the simplicity of the grain bill was nice, I’d like it to have just a touch more malt complexity. I took 1 pound of the base grain out and added in 1 pound of mild malt. As for the hop schedule, I went conservative with the hopping on the first round not wanting to blow this out with too much hops. I’m keeping the bittering ratio the same, but stepping up the late hop additions, adding a 170F whirlpool/hop stand, and adding in a third hop to the mix, Boadicea (pronounced boo-deh-kuh I believe).
Taste My Beer At HomebrewCon!
I plan to have both of these beers on tap at club night at HomebrewCon, so if you’re going and would like to taste them come find the AABG booth! I might also put another beer on at the social well if our club is taking a shift there this year, though I’m not sure if we are. If we do, it might be the stout I’m planning to make on Big Brew Day.