Brewing a hard cider is pretty easy. You get some apple cider, add some yeast, and wait. The yeast does all of the work and eventually turns all of the sugars into alcohol, leaving you with a nice dry hard cider. Here’s a great primer on Cider for Beginners.

Luckily, getting my hands on some fresh cider is pretty easy. A local brew shop, Sound Homebrew, does an annual pre-sale of fresh-pressed, unpasteurized cider juice from a Washington farm. I just take in a clean carboy and they fill it up. Beyond that, all that’s needed is yeast and time.

Making semi-sweet cider is a little bit harder. I’ve done this twice, but never wrote up my notes. This time I’m writing up my old notes prior to making another batch this Fall.

The main questions for making semi-sweet cider are:

1. What kind of yeast to use?
2. How to make it semi-sweet?

The weather finally turned nice in Seattle and I hadn’t brewed anything yet in 2017, so I thought I’d take advantage of the 80+ degree weather for this long Memorial Day weekend and try brewing a Saison. I figured it will be nice to have on hand for the hot days ahead.

I’ve also been interested in making a Saison with Wyeast 3711 (French Saison), which has a lower temperature range than Wyeast 3724. It was 3724 (Belgian Saison) that led to the infamous Exploding Saison disaster.

To make things interesting, I want to add peaches during fermentation, so this is going to be a Peach French Saison–Vive la Pêche.

For our annual pumpkin beer this year, we wanted to try something new. Jer found this article about designing the perfect pumpkin beer, and the mention of a Belgian pumpkin ale sparked our interest. Maybe we’ll get more pumpkin flavor with a lighter beer (compared to our usual Punkin’ Porter recipe).

See all of our previous Pumpkin Beers here

This brew is based on a clone of Elysian’s Avatar Jasmine IPA that I brewed on the stovetop during my toddler’s nap. Naptime Jasmine IPA. Naps aren’t that long, though, so I had to cheat and start before his nap and was still wrapping up when he woke.

I was running out of time to brew a beer this summer that would be ready in time to take to our friend Dean’s Brewfest in mid-September. I didn’t have the regular propane brew gear available this weekend, so I brewed on the stovetop for the first time since trying small batch brewing with the Apple Brown Betty Fall Ale.

I wanted to brew a simple German Hefeweizen with lots of banana and clove flavors for the summer. The recipe is pretty simple so I figured it would be pretty easy. Right?

This is the fourth year of brewing the Punkin’ Porter, which is the only one of our brews that has made so many repeat appearances.

Before kicking off our brew day we did a side-by-side tasting of the 2012 and 2011 batches. Unfortunately, the 2012 had a slight sour note to it. I assume this comes from experimenting with roasted pumpkin seeds, but really could stem from any part of the process of using real pumpkin. The 2011 batch was—even after two years—pretty amazing!

Half-Batch Brewing

I’m trying out brewing a small (half) batch recipe because this recipe might not be any good. Even if it is good, I don’t know that I want a full 5 gallons of this, so I just split the recipe in half and left all of the timings the same.

A 2.5 gallon batch seemed like an easy task for the kitchen stove. Unfortunately, bringing 2.5 gallons to a boil took a lot longer on the stove than with the turkey fryer!

This is a hodgepodge of a few recipes. I made my own apricot purée from fresh fruit. Hope it turns out ok! I made this one with help from my wife.

We’re brewing four batches to fill a 13.5 gallon Dry Fly Wheat Whiskey barrel! That should give us enough (~16 gallons or so) to fill the barrel and have extra to top off and maybe keep some as a control batch.

For our barrel project we decided on the recipe from The Homebrewer’s Recipe Guide that we used on our first test batch.

This is a scotch ale and is our third test beer as a candidate for barrel aging. The recipe comes from CloneBrews.

Sorry, no picture!

This is our second test beer as a candidate for barrel aging. We followed the recipe from BYO’s Belgian Abbey Style of the Month article (although the link is apparently dead). We also got a little help from our buddy Ty on this batch!

This is our first test beer as a candidate for barrel aging. The recipe is from The Homebrewer’s Recipe Guide. This is the first time we have used this recipe book.

As usual, for 2012 we once again followed the Extreme Brewing recipe and made modifications to the pumpkin process.

Previous batches:

• 2011 Punkin’ Porter
• 2010 Punkin’ Porter

We used the recipe for the Blood Orange Hefeweizen from Extreme Brewing but instead of out-of-season blood oranges we used in-season heirloom navel oranges. We know that it won’t be much like the recipe, but it still sounds good.

The beautiful and delicious 60 Minute IPA. We followed the Extreme Brewing recipe as close as we could.

This is our first brew from Brooklyn Brew Shop’s Beer Making Book. The book contains recipes for small 1‑gallon batches, but does include changes for making a normal 5‑gallon batch.

This Grapefruit Honey Ale sounded terrific to have ready to drink in Spring and Summer.

This is the 2012 version of the (Exploding) Ginger Saison without Ginger based on the recipe from Extreme Brewing

A simple Pale Ale brewed using only the homegrown Centennial and Cascade hops from my first year backyard hop harvest.

The label in the picture above doesn’t show clearly, but it’s actually this picture:

Last year’s Pumpkin Porter was too spicy and did not have very much pumpkin flavor. We’re hoping to balance the flavor out this year.

Today we wanted to do a Saison–something substantially different from The Hopfather, but still light enough for easy summer drinking.

We followed the Ginger Saison recipe from Sam Calagione’s Extreme Brewing, but did not include the ginger because we’ve had some less-than-pleasant results when using ginger in the past. Two recipes that included ginger–the Gingerbread Brown and a Fruitcake beer–were both overwhelmingly gingery. This time we just wanted a nice easy-to-drink Saison.

This is the real Hopfather recipe from Sam Calagione’s Extreme Brewing (see our failed attempt here). We went back to trusty old extract brewing for this batch and it was much easier and much less stressful.

This was a disaster.

We came up with this recipe while looking for inspiration to brew something up for the winter holidays. We followed the recipe for the Old Nut Case Brown Ale on page 92 of Radical Brewing and added the seasonal Gingerbread Ale spices as described on page 169.

We’re trying the Punkin’ Porter recipe out of Extreme Brewing.

On September 20, 2010 our friend Kolbe was driving through Eastern Washington and e-mailed us asking if we wanted him to pick up a 15-gallon oak barrel from Dry Fly Distilling used to age their Wheat Whiskey.

He wasn’t serious.

Our first attempt at homebrewing was a kit for an Amber Ale from Lazy Boy Brewing.