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.

Apfelwein (1 Month)

The Apfelwein cleared up and I tapped it on 12/14. Drinkable at this point. Getting better as it carbonates. I got some more apple juice at Costco over the weekend, so I started another batch on the yeast cake of this one after I kegged it.

The First Brew - Results

I kegged my first brew a while ago, but it took me a while to get these pictures up. I think this beer was a hit and a miss. It's drinkable, but I don't think the final gravity ever got low enough. It's a little on the sweet side.


Hooked up to the kegerator successfully. Since this picture was taken, I've changed my beer line to 10 feet.