New Brew: Mary's Marzen

Rick's grandmother passed away last week and we brewed this beer in memorial of her on the night before Rick flew out to Oregon for her funeral. Rick said that she was actually from Germany, and in her later years she would be caught from time to time speaking German to nobody in particular. Hopefully this rich Oktoberfest* style will have us doing the same.

*Yes, I know a true Oktoberfest (or Marzen) is supposed to use lager yeast not ale yeast, sue me. It's also supposed to be brewed in a cave by Germans, and fermented by divine intervention.

Brewing
Date: 5/3/10
Name of beer: Mary's Marzen
Type of beer: Oktoberfest ale
Quantity: 5 gallons
Homage Beer: Blizzard Wizzard Dunkelweizen (See pic below:

From 2010_May

Homage Beers!


This recipe was copied almost exactly from here (except I forgot to get irish moss ...oops), so instead of trying to pretend like I came up with it I'll just save us all time and space and give a link.

Now pictures!

From 2010_May

Yep. That's a lot of grain.

From 2010_May

Pro tip: once your grain is done in the partial mash, what is leftover can be used for an awesome bowl of cereal. Just add milk and some brown sugar or honey.

From 2010_May

Smack that yeast! (it deserves it)


Anyway, we're going to transfer this one to a secondary next week and then bottle it up about 10 days later. It'll then sit in a cool dark spot all summer, and be taken out in Oktober to be drunk.

More updates to come

Too Busy Brewing to Update?

Ha, I wish.

Either way. We've been keeping busy. I could list off what we've done and go into the minutia, but instead I think I'm just going to post pictures. Fun, right?

From 2010_February

When I left off, we were just bottling up the Blizzard Wizzard Dunkelweizen. When this blog post is finished, I'll have just finished off the very last bottle (third from right, second row, maybe)

From 2010_May

Here are three of the last dunkelweizens (and Rick's hand).

From 2010_March

This is the epic Morning Wood Breakfast Stout. Yes, real mature, I know. Anyway, this one was an oatmeal stout with chocolate and (home roasted) coffee. Yum.


So after brewing the stout, we next did a ginger ale. Not to be confused with something you would put in your whiskey, this was actually an ale with about a couple pounds of ginger in it. Really really good, but we're currently having carbonation problems with the keg:

From 2010_April

Rick and Geordie kegging the "Gingervitus"

From 2010_May

This picture is pure beer porn

More to come soon...