Brewing Under a Blue Moon

Saturdays bottling session opened up a fermenter - which means it must be filled again.  So on Sunday I brewed "La Lune Bleu"; a beer which should resemble Blue Moon (in Canada, sold in a weakened form as "Richards White").  Its a Belgian-style wheat beer, with a yeasty twist.  Its made with a mix of barely malt, wheat malt, and rolled oats, with hints of hop bitterness, orange peel and coriander.  But this brew does away with the typical yeasts normally used in Blegian wheats, which produce fruity/estery flavours which tend to predominate Belgian beers.  In its place a mild ale yeast is used, allowing the malt flavour and spices to shine through.

A few pics below the fold.

Bottling the Parallax

Saturday was Bottling day.  The new labels look good on the bottle (see left image).

A few more pictures can be found below the fold

Labelize the brew

I've been brewing for nearly 18 years, but despite that, I've never given much thought to naming my beers, nor to making labels for my bottles.  Motivated by the amazing labels some brewers have made (here's a whole thread of amazing examples, over at HomeBrewTalk), I decided to try myself.  Being both a professional scientist, and a science nerd in general, I've decided to go with science-themed beer names.

This is my first attempt at a label, for my first all-grain beer since returning to brewing:

This is a 'tax stamp' style label, with the brewery logo (the black circle) centred over the cap, and the remainder glued to the neck of the bottle.  The QR code (generated by the excellent free service at http://www.qrstuff.com) encodes the recipe for 23L (5 imp Gal/6US Gal) of beer.  The beer itself is a heavily hopped pale ale, with a bit of a kick (6.0% ABV; in reality its probably 6.2%).

As for the name - parallax is a way of measuring distances by measuring the apparent change in position of an object as the position of the observer changes.  Its used to plot the position of close stars, by measuring the change in position of the star as the earth moves 1/2 way through its orbit.  What does parallax have to do with beer?  Very little - unless you drink too much, after which your defocused eyes may give you a bit of a sense of parallax...

Beginning Afresh

Welcome to my new blog, which will hopefully be slightly more successful (and slightly less nerdy) than my old (and apparently defunct, based on my activity there) science blog.

This blog is, in part, to record my return to home brewing, a hobby I've enjoyed for nearly 18 years, but one which I temporarily left for four years while pursuing my career (read: was living in a s**ty apartment while working 12+ hour days).  I also hope that this blog will become the home of a local (perhaps Canada-wide) yeast bank and related protocols.  I've run one such bank in the past, and hope to start another in the near future.

Hopefully, as of this weekend, I'll have some actual brewing-related posts to share.