Brew in review

As a followup to our last post, I'm posting some photos of our Kind of Blue brew session. All went well, and we are looking forward to having our awesome blueberry beer ready in a few days!

Even our kegs were surprised that they are empty! Time to brew!

Nothing finer than early morning brewing.

Mashing in with our Brew In A Bag (BIAB) set up.

Once we get to the correct mash temperature, we have a highly sophisticated method of insulating the mash to keep the temperature constant for an hour: towels fresh from the dryer. 

Pre-boil sample lookin' good!

This is one of my favorite shots from brew day. The bag being suspended contains our hops additions. We have a cord that is tied to the garage door tracks that supports our BIAB bag while we rinse all the sugars out. It keeps us from having to hoist and hold 30+ pounds of soaked, hot grains.

Once everything is cooled to the right temperature, we begin transferring to our fermentation vessel. Today we got to break in our brand new Big Mouth Bubbler!

Mmmmmm...

5.5 happy gallons, ready to begin fermenting.

We had a very smooth brew day, and we finished in plenty of time to watch some Aggie Football!

We have since brewed again; this time we tried a new porter recipe. We are going to experiment with adding hatch chili peppers to this one. We decided to call it Rio Bravo Hatch Chile Porter after the river that runs through Hatch, New Mexico. Yes, we Americans call it the Rio Grande, but en Espanol, it is called Rio Bravo del Norte. Feel free to make any number of connections with Breaking Bad.

Today's Main Break: The Great American Beer Festival is taking place in Colorado this week. This is widely considered the largest American beer festival, and this year about 600 different breweries are sharing their beer!