I spent a couple of hours on Sunday brewing up some of my favourite beer. The recipe I concocted is a knock off of a beer by a producer in Scotland called "Brew Dog" and it aims to reproduce their original (famous) "Punk IPA" which probably did more for craft brewing in the UK in the last few years than any other single brew. The beer is quite light (the commercial version is even lighter than mine) almost lager colour and is full of exotic, tropical, spicy American and New Zealand hops*, so many in fact that I'm only just getting rid of the smell in the kitchen (although TBH I've had worse smells in my kitchen!)
The picture shows my primary fermenter after a day and a bit; the English ale yeast is working it's magic and there's a constant stream of carbon dioxide bubbles emerging from the air lock at the top of the vessel. You can see the yeast settling out at the bottom and also a bit floating at the top; after 4-5 days the top gunk should sink down to the bottom allowing me to siphon out the clear beer into a secondary fermenter ready for bottling. Hopefully I got my quantities a bit more accurate this time and I'll end up with more or less a gallon of beer (8 pints) which I will bottle in a couple of weeks time (unless I cock something up!)
The next challenge is to come up with a name and a label for the beer; being a die hard Clint Eastwood fan (films before "The Gauntlet") I'm thinking I'll go with an outline of a Magnum .44 and the name "Do I feel lucky"; a pub quiz on a bottle!
*Columbus, Ahtanum, Chinook, Simcoe and Nelson Sauvin
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