Hail Cascadia!

We bottled this last night.  The taste was not what I expected…I’m not sure if I like it or not.  I dry-hopped per the recipe, but only for 2-3 days.  If I would have been thinking, I would have halved the amount, due to the poor efficiency of my mash.  So the hops were VERY forward, but not unpleasant.  The bitterness was strong, but not objectionable.  There was a bitter after-taste, though.  And smoke.  I have no idea where that taste comes from!  I didn’t use the Polyclar, because it was pretty darn clear.  I had the fermentation chamber in the low 60s for the secondary.

Oh, well…we’ll see what a couple of weeks and some carbonation does for it.

BeerXML

BJCP Guidelines:Specialty Beer

Dang…I missed the OG by a mile on this, my first all-grain brew session.  I don’t have a proper mash tun, but I’ve been doing my partial mashes with the grain in a bag in my bottling bucket.  So, I used the same method for this recipe, but put all the grain in.  I’m thinking I may have sparged (rinsed, really) too quickly.  I harvested a good 5 gallons of sweet wort, and it looked good:

but my gravity reading at end of boil showed 1.036.  I also topped up the batch volume to 7 gallons in the primary.  I was kind of hoping for a session beer, but I hope it isn’t hopelessly weak.  We’ll just have to wait and see…
All the hop additions went well, though.  Using Beersmith Lite on my android phone worked really well.  I separated all the boil additions onto individual plates, then just dumped them in when the alarm told me to.  Pretty slick!  All in all, a glorious brew day on Easter.