Wyse Guys Brewing

 Merry Christmas, I got an amazing gift from my wife, a used ~3gal whiskey barrel from local distiller Heritage Distilling. In homage to one of my favorite local breweries I fired up a Fremont B-Bomb Clone. It is the largest and darkest grain bill to date. Coming in at a whopping 14% ABV that really pushed the US-05 yeast to the limit. About half of the 5gal batch ended up in the barrel.

 One of my favorite past times was attending the Fremont Oktoberfest in October every year, but the pandemic shut that down hard. What was left, the only option was to brew an oktoberfest. It follows a similar profile of prior oktoberfests with a protein rest at 122, ramping up to 130 and then 150 during the mash with light hops from Saaz and Spalt for that perfect finish. It was a very rainy day so I setup in the garage, with a CO detector, and all doors open.

 This American IPA packs a whopping 11.5oz of fresh hops from my neighbor across the alley. It turned out much better than my first fresh hop beer and was supremely drinkable. Unfortunately, no pictures survived this brew day.

 It was such a hit the first time that I fired up a second batch with a few tweaks. It was a gorgeous afternoon right before my birthday and an excellent brew day.

 Pandemic has started and its time to find some normalcy, let's brew a maibock a german ale dreaming of spring. Since I don't have picks from brew day, here's a picture of kegging.