Manito Tap House

Checked out the Manito Tap House during their soft opening on Friday. An Impressive selection of taps.

SpoBREW - The Competition

I was unable to attend the competition at the Porch on July 9th, but Will was there to represent the Official Tin Can Committee. Our brew of choice for the competition was the hot chocolate porter. We ended up placing third out of seventeen on both the judge's list and the brewer's list. We are pretty happy with the results. Here are a number of links to check out.

SpoCool Wrap-up

Hot Chocolate Porter Write-up

All SpoBREW posts

My pics from the brew

SpoBREW - Secondary & Kegging

So a week after our Memorial Day brew day it was time to secondary. This is where things got interesting. Our porter recipe became a chipotle porter using chipotle tabasco and a hot chocolate porter using cinnamon, lactose, and vanilla. We left one amber as is, but added blood orange juice to the other. One IPA was dryhopped with whole leaf Cascadehops and Centennial hops. The other was dryhopped with just Calypso hops.

Ten days after the secondary we kegged all six batches. All six beers tasted pretty good right out of the secondary. I took the chipotle porter and the amber home to carbonate.

SpoBREW - Brew Day Part 2

SpoBREW - Brew Day Part 1

The Spokane food blog SpoCOOL decided to put on a homebrewing competition. I enlisted my coworker Will as my partner and we set about designing our brew. We quickly decided that we didn't want to rely on one recipe. We chose three recipes to brew to be split into 6 different beers with different additions. We brewed three ten gallon batches on Memorial Day; a porter, amber, and IPA. Here are some pics from the day. A leaky wort chiller required some soldering, but for the most part brewing went off without a hitch.

Firkin Friday

I've been having a fantastic time at Jones Radiator since it opened. They have great beer and something you don't always find at beer bars: a happy hour! They started Firkin Friday last month. The first friday of each moth they are going to have a firkin on tap. Last month, local brewer Chachi from C.I. Shenanigan's brought his cask-conditioned porter. Tomorrow will be a firkin from Two Beers Brewery of their EVO IPA.

Washington Beer Open House 2011

On February 26th, the Washington Beer Commission held an open house at breweries across the state. It is essentially the Washington version of Zwickelmania. The only location in Spokane participating was C.I. Shenanigan's. Shenanigan's is affiliated with The Ram and mostly brews recipes from their brewery. The brewmaster at Shenanigan's gets to experiment with some of his own recipes as well. We got to taste a handfull of beers from the zwickel (what is a zwickel?) while we were there.

The Beers:

Dark Czar Russian Imperial Stout
Unnamed Belgian Golden Ale
Big Red IPA*
Ole St. Mick's Irish Stout*

*Ram recipe