General Update + Blue Hood Revisited

As sometimes happens during rainy periods of summer, brewing has gotten slightly out of hand. Steam beer and wheat beer are both exellent on draft, although it no longer feels like wheat beer weather. An Amarillo IPA is about ready to tap. If my blasted wit every stops fermenting it's next on draft. Also resting in secondary ( it may be ready to keg sooner) is my India Brown, version II. Upstairs are a Belgian double in a vaguely Westvletereney vein that needs racking pretty badly (tomorrow?) as well as a Belgian pale that is just getting going. My long term carboy agers (a Flanders red and a lambic) are getting too warm and need to be gently carried to the basement. There's an altbier in primary and that crazily over-hopped DIPA that'll be ready to bottle in a week or so. Oh, and the spruce beer went well and is chugging away in the kitchen. Shoot. That's a lot of beer. I mean, woo-hoo, that's a lot of beer! The next major project will involve an epic series of Saisons using both White Labs 565 and the Farmhouse strain from Wyeast.

By way of a random check-up I'm having one of the very few bottles of Blue Hood Pale ale. This was a sort of cross between an APA and pseudo-lager and I'd been thinking about redoing it. It was 1053 worth of Vienna mashed at 151 and hopped with Mt. Hood to the tune of about 38 IBU's. In other words it's brewed to Sierra Nevada pale ale specs but with Euro or Euro-derived ingredients. One of its best features is the head; it's like freaking shaving cream and it never goes away. I have to assume that's the Vienna somehow. No P-rest by the way. It kind of combines a full, relatively dense malt character with subtle hopping that feels like Hallertau somehow. I think it's probably worth doing again but I'm not sure how/if to tweak it. I could see mashing it at 1-2 degrees cooler, hitting it with one interesting specialty malt, and dry-hopping it... But I have no idea if that'd be an improvement as such. One way or the other, I've got to use up some Vienna as I have most of a sack. I could save some for an all-Vienna lager next winter. I could also see a Vienna Saison--maybe I'll put a big chunk of Vienna in my winter Saison...