Bataille des Bieres Results

Recently, the Lafayette homebrew club, Dead Yeast Society, put on a homebrew competition. There were 4 categories of beer: Light Hybrid Beer, American Ale, Stout, and India Pale Ale.

Sam and I decided to enter our Guilty Pleasure Milk Stout. There were 19 entries in the stout category. Here are the results:

Pretty good for our first competition!

SILVER MEDAL!!! We are both very excited about the results. The stout had the most entries in it of the four categories. So to those of you who have tried this beer, thank you for your positive feedback. For those of you who have not yet tried this brew, don't worry, we will definitely be making it again.

You will notice there are three styles of stout listed here. If you want to read more about different styles of beer, mead, and cider, here is a good link explaining all of them:  http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/catdex.php

On another exciting note, we are finally engaged!

She almost cried!

For the wedding, we will be serving our homebrewed beer. Hopefully by then we have a few more award winners. Until then, Cheers!

Keg Stands are for Poor College Kids

I love talking to people about my hobby of homebrewing. Usually the first question is "Is it any good?" or "How much does it cost?" To these I always say that it is easy to make beer, but it takes some effort to make good beer. The cost is much cheaper than your average night at the bar. On average, a 5 gallon batch costs just under $1 per 12 oz. beer. One time I was even asked "Can you make _____ Lite?" To respond, I turned to the water faucet and filled an empty pint glass. I handed it to that former friend and said "Here you go". I say 'former' in the nicest way possible.

 



Won't see this in our hallway

Sam and I finally took the plunge and dug deeper into our homebrewing hobby. Part of me was tired of manually capping 50 bottles of beer at a time, and part of me was tired waiting 2 weeks for the beer to carbonate. So instead of bottling, now it's time to start kegging. Now I know what some of you are thinking...

But you won't find any red Solo cups in this house. Sam and I recently purchased a three tap keezer with three 5 gallon kegs. Keezer is how us beer people lazily say "keg freezer". It's essentially an old box freezer with an external temperature control attached, to regulate the temperature. It can hold all three kegs at once.

 

And we still call this room "the office"

With this kegging system, we carbonate the beer inside of the kegs using a CO2 tank. The process is called "forced carbonation" The CO2 is pumped into the keg to pressurize it. Using this method, the beer can be carbonated and ready to pour anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks. This means the process can be much faster than carbonating in individual bottles.



It has been fun making labels for all of the beer bottles, but we plan on still designing labels. It gives us something to do in our spare time, and gives me something to post other than pictures of ourselves. (Although I don't hear anyone complaining about that).

 

Sam and I have two homebrew competitions coming up in January/February. We will be entering two beers in these competitions. First is Guilty Pleasure, our milk stout, or sweet stout. It is flavored with unsweetened cocoa, and fermented lactose sugar. Second, is Double Fault, an American Pale Ale. You can see the label for this beer on our last post. This will probably be the lightest beer in color we have brewed to date, but by far the hoppiest.

 

With most of our beer being kegged now, I guess that means more people will have to come to visit us in Baton Rouge to drink our beer. Be sure to leave a comment if you want to try some of our brews, exchange recipes, or just have something important to say. Next scheduled brew will be an Irish Red Ale. We will keep brewing, so I hope you keep following.

Cheers!

Authors Note: To any college kids, keg stand lovers, or the easily offended: Please do not be offended by the title of this post. If you are, just relax and enjoy a homebrew. Don't have any homebrew? Enjoy a local craft beer.