Last week we were lucky enough to meet Al Buck and his wife Nina, winner of our Batch #50 competition. They flew in from New Jersey to help, err…make sure we didn’t screw up his recipe too badly when it came time to brew his Gueuze. We put him to work early Thursday morning mashing in the thickest mash we have ever done at the brewery. His recipe called for using a turbid mash which meant Al had a long day of mixing this insanely thick mixture of un-malted wheat and barley, which isn’t easy, believe me! Hopefully, we came close enough to his original recipe; I can only hope that our version turns out as good as his, which is amazing to say the least! After about a 12 hour brew day (that’s including clean-up) his beer was in the fermenter pitched with yeast and bacteria that he provided himself. He keeps all these cool yeasts and bacteria banked at his house! The next night I had the privilege to hang out with Al and Nina while drinking some of his amazing homebrew and talking yeast; he is a very knowledgeable guy and I love learning new things about brewing! It was a pleasure meeting both of them and I hope they can make it out next year (or sooner) to help us brew the second part of his recipe (it’s a blend of two and one year old lambic.)
Thanks Al and Nina, I had fun brewing and drinking some great beer with you over the past few days!
3 comments:
Tyler, you broke the blog!
Not that I'm not super, super excited about this beer... but isn't it physically impossible to brew a gueuze, being that they're blends of lambics? So... aren't you brewing a lambic?
Correct Derek, we brewed the first batch of lambic-style ale to be blended as a "gueuze". I hesitate to say lambic since it wasn't spotaneously fermented, and a gueuze is typically a blend of 1,2, and 3 yr lambics - but hey, who's counting? It will hopefully be blended and dry-hopped w/ some lemony Sorachie Ace hops and refermented again in the bottle.
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