A lot of people look forward to a Friday night to go out on the town and do something amazing. I look forward to just relaxing and doing nothing sometimes, and that’s what I had planned for this evening, but my version of ‘doing nothing’ means I can focus on some hobbies and drink beer. In this case, I was drinking beer AND making beer! I found a nice 12 pack of summery beers from Magic Hat to enjoy:

Its summer, so I wanted to brew a beer that was ultra refreshing and easy to drink. A heavy IPA can be a little.. well.. heavy, so I took to the web and looked up some concepts to point me in the right direction. I have really been liking the flavor of cherry in my cocktails as of recent, so I looked into some ideas involving cherries. I found a sour cherry berliner weiss – which was tempting, but I wanted cherry flavor without the sour. As I kept peeping the internet, I started gravitating towards a blueberry berliner weiss accentuated by the flavor of real cherries. I ended up conceptualizing a beer I’m going to call ‘Blooberweiss’. I’m shooting for a 4.2% abv, and trying to infuse fruit flavor in the secondary. Knowing the actual ABV for this thing is going to be very difficult. I’ll take a gravity reading prior to pitching and look online to see what purees might add, but I’m just going by the brewpal app in that I’ll be hitting about 4.2%.

Anyways…  It was off to Niagara Tradition – but before I went, I needed to come up with a shopping list!  I actually wanted to buy supplies for another beer while I was there, because I have plans to brew soon with a friend. You can see below that I’ll be attempting to replicate the ‘Hop Slice’ from Deschutes, but putting my own spin on it . Pay no attention to the scheduling of my hops for the Blooberweiss, I don’t know what I was thinking…

Here is the transcribed Blooberweiss recipe… hop schedule a little more refined, but you can see the name changed..  I blame the drinks.

You can see my grand scheme for filtering this beer – I think it needs to be filtered – I want it to be crystal clear.

Mash went really well since I have added a nylon bag to my mash tun. Goodbye Stuck mash!

There were some other yummy treats that came out during the brew process –

Some Rye moonshine:

And a home made Gruit – very interesting… That’s another post though…

I think I may be converted to smack packs – not going to lie, they seem to be very effective!

This baby was swelled up proper within 2 hours! oh and what’s that in the background?  yeah, thats all the grain for the next batch of beer:

It was a long night, and I’m tired as hell now, and I’ll go to bed after my final hop additon:

Anyways, Friday night brew nights might make me seem like a loser, but I love my hobbies, I couldn’t ask for a better brew session – nothing went wrong except for forgetting the name when I transcribed to the big black book and forgot the name I was using..

What do you think I should call it!?