Levud's

Last Sunday I met up with Mark Graham and Loren Miraglia at Mark's beautiful house in San Clemente to brew a 10 gallon batch of the Batch No. 01 Competition winner, Levud's. This is a Golden Strong Belgian Ale that is remarkably simple in ingredients, but overwhelmingly complex in flavor. I had a lot of fun watching these guys brew. They are so laid back and yet still finished brewing the batch in around 3 hours-- remarkable! I can't do that even when I'm paying full attention to what I'm doing. To their credit, they had everything ready to go. The grain was crushed, the strike water was to temp., and the beers were cold (but not too cold).

Loren and Mark will be helping me brew this batch commercially. 34 bbl of this will be brewed, so it will technically be Batch No. 01 and No. 02, but we'll consider it all one batch since it'll be fermenting in the same fermenter. 30 bbl will go into stainless, and 4 bbl will be fermenting in oak. I'm doing two batches of it because I feel this beer will sell very well, so I want to make enough to meet demand, and because I have no idea what the efficiency on my system will be. If the first batch extracts way too many or way too few fermentables, I have a second chance to brew it and average out the first batch to where we want. You only get to brew Batch No. 01 once, so I want it to be as close to the original as possible.

Thanks Mark and Loren, can't wait to brew this with you guys!