Yesterday, I brewed up the blonde ale.  With Halloween festivities starting up in the afternoon, I set up an early morning brew session.

It wasn’t going to be a mammoth session like the Rauchbier, since I was only going to do an hour boil.  Plus cooling to ale fermentation temperatures doesn’t take as long as cooling the wort to lager temperatures.

This blonde ale was really an experiment into how my homegrown hops “performance”.  With this first year of growth, I got just over an ounce of hop flowers from the Magnum rhizome that I planted.

Having no idea what the alpha acid numbers are on these hops, I threw most of them in at 60 minutes and some in at 30 minutes.

I took and tasted a sample as I was racking the wort from the kettle to the fermenter.  Not absolutely sure, but it tasted well hopped to me.

Let’s see if the Magnum hops have the clean bitterness that people claim they have.  I don’t think this beer will be a hop bomb.  The hop tastes were pretty “noble” – spicy and floral, not citrusy.  It will be more in the vein of how Sam Adams hops their beers.

Scorecard

Things that went right:

– Color looked good, pretty light and blonde-ish

– I made a 2 L yeast starter and it was alive and kicking when I pitched it.  Vigorous fermentation started in less than 24 hours.

– Good boil throughout.  I made sure I had my propane tank in a pool of water to keep it from frosting up.

Things that, uh, didn’t go right:

– I need to have a better solution for whole hop brewing.  I opened the valve on my kettle, it got clogged.  I auto siphoned, it got clogged.  I poured the rest of the wort through a funnel with a screen on it, it got clogged a little bit.

– I cooled the wort to 62 degrees, and it should have been 67.  I am not sure what effect this had on the yeast, but my timing on chilling could have been better.