Before I get onto the main subject of this post, I just want to mention I took a couple bottles of our first-ever homebrew, a black IPA, to the club meeting on Tuesday and it was well-received. "Doesn't have the typical 'kit flavor'" was said by more than a couple of the members. While it was brewed from a kit - it was a kit assembled by the homebrew shop (Great Fermentations), rather than a commercially packaged, mass-produced kit. And while it used extracts (liquid and dry), it also used a lot of specialty grains, and lots of separate hop additions during the boil, as well as dry-hopping in secondary. So, a very complex "kit." Anyway - we're happy with our first brew!

Our second batch will be a Northern English Brown Ale (11C), from extract-with-specialty-grains, a recipe of my own design, cobbled together from what others have done. Can't wait to get it going.

My favorite style of beer, overall, is Stout. And one of the most interesting varieties of Stout is Russian Imperial Stout, or simply Imperial Stout. It has a higher alcohol content, and higher hop (bitter) content than the other Stout styles, in order to survive export to Russia from Great Britain. It also allows for a huge range of specialty grains to be used to create flavors in the brew.

So - our first batch of all-grain brew will be a Russian Imperial Stout! We don't have the gear for doing all-grain yet, but we'll work on getting that set up, and in the meantime, make the Northern English Brown using extract. Moving to all-grain will be exciting!

We're also getting into tinkering with water chemistry. We never do anything half-way. Sigh. :D