For me, this brings up an interesting point because I am actually brewing a holiday favorite of mine this weekend!  I’ll get to that in a minute.  For the holidays, I would say there are three beers that stand out to me.  The first was my doppelbock.  This was a great beer and I personally credit a lot of this to the fact that I decoction mash.  Before you jump in and tell me that modern grains are modified and don’t need a decoction mash, I know.  However, I would argue that there is some caramelization of the sugars in the process that contributes some unique qualities to the flavor.  Plus its a cool process that pre-dates thermometers, how many things do you do today that do that?

The second brew for me would be the Wilford’s Best Oatmeal Stout I just brewed.  I’ve already killed a keg of it!  I don’t like that fact, but it’s a stout I am still not sick of.  This is a great beer that is easy to drink and a nice little winter warmer.

Finally, my Bobby Brown ale that was the first brew Nick and I made together (shed a tear).  This was one of the earlier beers I all-grain brewed and it was my first 10 gallon brew.  At the time, we were really happy with the brew, but about a year later we cracked open a flip top of it and it was still awesome!  That’s why I am brewing it again this weekend:

Bobby Brown this time around:

• 20.5lb US2 row pale
• 4lbd Crystal 60L
• .75lb Chocolate malt
• .25lb Black patent
• 2oz Norther Brewer 60min
• 1oz Cascade 30min
• 1oz Cascade 15min
• 1oz fuggles dry hop
• Irish Ale Yeast (reused from some of my earlier brews)

The yeast is different on this one, but everything else should be the same.  This will also be my first time using my pump and my newly installed sparge-arm so hopefully everything functions.

So today we brewed a 10 gallon batch of American Brown Ale. I am leaning towards doo doo brown ale, but we will see if that will end up as the name. We started this morning at 7am and pitched at 12:30 making it a 6 hour brew day (with cleanup). Not too bad.

This was the first time I have had a fellow brewer so I was pretty fired up. With a 10 gallon batch it’s a must. There was no way I would have been able to lift the kettle on my own. For the second time we hit all the vitals for this recipe (1.041 pre-boil OG, 1.051 pitching OG) and got through all the heat infusions without a problem.

One thing that caused a problem was that the sparge arm I just made had some “technical” and engineering issues. First off, because of the way that the sparge sat under the water reservoir, the hose kinked causing a pretty light flow. The engineering issue was caused by the fact that I used a chunk of garden hose that could leave funky flavors in my brew. Not the end of the world, just some tweaking.

Now for this brew we used American Ale yeast from Nick’s last IPA batch that he just bottled last night. To increase the volume that we were working with, Nick boiled up some corn sugar and made a little starter. We split the starter this morning into our buckets are we are hoping that it works out.

This is the largest batch that I have done with this larger brew kettle and we had a boil over early on in the brewing. This was something I never would have imagined, because the kettle is so big, but it did. No big deal though a little time to rest and some cleaning of the propane burner and we were as good as new.

Good stuff. Cheers!

Notes: Late fermentation, it took about 32 hours to start fermenting, and I had to bring the brew to about 63F to get it moving. Temp increased to 66F and the fermentation picked up.

I think that the problems spawned from a bad pitch, I had not given the yeast enough time to wake up from the cold.

I introduced the brown sugar before the secondary fermentation (I forgot to add it during the primary), I would not recommend this as a normal practice because all of the additional activity will keep the brew from clearing up the way that you want.