Saturday, January 22, 2011

First Beer of 2011

So here it is...


I decided that for my New Years resolution, I was going to brew a different beer ever month of 2011. I came to this resolution for two reasons:



  • I love beer. A lot.
  • I love brewing beer
To date, I've brewed three beers. My first was a ginger saison that I brewed with my friend Eric, owner of Novare Res. The second was a beer I brewed specifically for my wedding on New Years day. The third was a redux of the first ginger saison with some major changes.


This blog is mainly an outlet for my year of brewing. 12 beers really isn't that big of a deal, but for a novice brewer, I'd like to keep a record of what I do and how I do it. If you'd like to see my recipes you can find them on Hopville here: http://hopville.com/brewer/seavers


For my first beer of 2011, I decided to brew an IPA. I love the style and I figured it would make a good starting point for the year. I settled on a clone recipe for New Belgium's Ranger IPA created by Hopville user
 jlanier01 with some modifications to suit my taste. I picked this beer because I love New Belgium and I knew that if I came close, it would be something that folks around here had never had.

So, on to the brewing. I used Alexander's extract, which I've never used before, but I don't envision being an issue. I would love to do some all-grain brewing, but my living situation just does not allow for it. So extract it is. The pre-boil tea of cara-pils and crystal 60L just smells fantastic. I can already tell this is going to be a hardy beer, just by the smell of the malts.

As you can see from Hopville, I am using four different hops; Chinook, Cascade, Centennial, and Simcoe. I am using the Centenial just for dry hopping, but I think that I'll get a nice smooth finish with the Simcoe as the bittering agent.

As this is my first IPA, we'll see in a few weeks where it takes us, but I am pretty confident that this is going to be a really fantastic IPA.

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