Playing Around

So, today is the last day of classes in my first of two years for the Brewmaster and Brewery Operations Management Diploma at Olds College.  It is indeed bittersweet.  On the one hand, my sleep schedule may once again attain normality and my bank account can stop hemorrhaging and begin to recharge.  On the other, I am saying a temporary goodbye to 25 great drinking buddies and easy access to a sort of hive mind of beer knowledge and brewing ideas that our program has become.  The three most common questions that I have heard asked lately seem to be: Have you finished assignment X?  Where are you going to be working? and What beer are you going to brew this summer?

I certainly have a plan in my mind about what I am going to brew in the next four months and in the past I have usually brewed alone.  This summer is different, I have been spoiled lately.  I have been living and breathing brewing and my mind has been racing with new ideas for recipes or reviving styles or contemplating what a beer could taste like with random ingredients.  And so has everyone else.  We have become a sounding board for each other; we share ideas and thoughts and sometimes things click.  We get two or more people with similar notions and a new beer is born.  We have become collaboration brewers on a homebrew scale.

Purple Nurple: started orange and ended pink!

I bought a large selection of supplies to get me through my brewing withdrawals over Christmas and ended up with some extra Saison yeast.  I had been tossing the idea of brewing a beer with beetroot in my mind for a while and when I got back to class and mentioned this, one of my peers informed me that another classmate, Foster, had expressed the same interest.  I immediately presented my idea for a Beet Saison to him and off we went.  We determined that we had a similar vision for the beer and I presented my recipe ideas. He proposed some changes and then we did some tweaking to get it just right.  After some preliminary testing, we set a brew day for our creation lovingly dubbed the Purple Nurple.  It turned out great!  Together we had discussed how to make the beets sing without tasting like cooked vegetables, we researched and sniffed hops to get that right earthy-spiciness, we were an unstoppable team.

The entire year has been a collection of these moments: testing different honeys for an English Honey Ale, sharing experience and equipment for making lagers, testing the effects of water profiles on Pilsners.  IPA's have been born from the simple line "I've got these hops. what do you have?"  When I set up my equipment on a brew day over the summer, I know I am going to have fun and learn something new- I always do.  But it is certainly going to lack a little bit of a spark, that energy you get from sharing your passion with a like minded soul.  I can't wait to see what my classmates have come up with over the next few months, what ideas they've got fermenting.  But more importantly, I can't wait to start turning these thoughts into delicious beer with my friends.

Until then, Cheers!

Speaking of fermenting-
Apparently honey makes yeast buzz too!