I yielded only .3 oz of homegrown hops (it was the first year) and I’m finally going to use them. They are Cascade. They’ve been in the freezer a few months. This will be my first time using whole leaf hops, and of course ones I grew! For this beer I decided to do all Centennial and throw in mine with one minute left on the boil. I’m hoping to be able to actually single out the flavor from the Cascade… the amount is very little though so we’ll see. I finally decided to try doing liquid yeast and a yeast starter too (another first for me!) My brother-in-law is Co-brewer on this.

Ingredients

Grain Bill

• 11 lbs 2-Row
• 1 lb crystal 40
• 8 oz Vienna malt

Hops

• 1 oz Centennial pellets @ 60 min
• 1 oz Centennial pellets @ 20 min
• 2 oz Centennial pellets @ 5 min
• .3 oz Cascade whole leaf hops @ 1 min

Yeast

• Wyeast 1056

Misc

• Irish moss
• PH 5.2 stabilizer

Yeast Starter (4/1/2017)

I learned about this from this Northern Brewer on YouTube, and tweaked it a little to get a full 2000 ml starter. Beersmith advises me to use a 2.4 l starter, and the Northern Brewer video shows you how to make a 1.5 l starter, so I split the difference. Plus I don’t have a big enough flask.

1. Wyeast 1056 “smacked” around 10:20 am
2. Boiled 1.3 cups light DME and 2000 ml of water about 10 mins
3. pitched the puffed up yeast packet around 2 pm. Wort temp was in the high 70’s
4. No stir plate, so I’m swirling it around every once in a while.

Brew Day (4/2/2017)

1. Started around 11:40am
2. Brought just under 4 gallons of water to 164F – target mash temp is 152F for 60 mins
3. Added PH 5.2 stabilizer and preheated mash tun about 4 or 5 mins
4. Mash initially hit only 147F, then went to 148F for the majority of the mash – I didn’t have any adjustment water so we are going to probably end up with a lighter-bodied beer.
5. Sparged with 4 gallons of water; collected 6 gallons of wort
6. Boil and hop additions. We rolled the whole leaf hops between our fingers and crushed them up a lot. They went in with only 1 minute left on the boil.
7. Wort chiller and irish moss went in with only 5 minutes left… oops
8. Took about an hour to get wort to pitching temp of around 72-74F
9. OG: 1.064
10. Just under 5 gallons in fermenter, including the 2l starter. We didn’t collect a lot of wort due to losing some from straining out hops etc
11. First time using my new plastic 7 gallon Fermonster fermenter…

Bottling (4/18/2017)

Bottled after just over 2 weeks in primary. Used 4.15 oz corn sugar dissolved in 2 cups water. FG 1.009 (7.2% ABV). Yielded 47 beers

Tasting (Ongoing)

There’s something a little off on this. It has a bit of a medicinal/strong alcohol finish. Maybe from the homegrown hops that were in the freezer. It’s drinkable, but I don’t love it.