Ginger IPA

In taking a note from Randy Mosher's book (Radical Brewing) we will soon be bring ginger -- one of our all-time favorite spices -- to beer!

He recommends adding 2lbs of honey and 2oz of candied ginger to the secondary of your favorite IPA recipe. Instead , I think we will hold off on the honey in secondary and use honey as priming sugar. And maybe increase the ginger...

Sounds like a plan...

Lime-Cucumber Soda

The Tap-a-Draft mini-keg system has provided some nice options for storing and serving my beers but it has also made it possible to make soda without using sugar and bread yeast in recycled 2L bottles.

A friend of mine recently had a Mr. Q. Cumber Soda, and let us all have a try. Other than being way too sweet, cucumber makes an awesome soda! So I decided to make a lime-cucumber flavored soda water in my mini-keg system...

1/2 hothouse cucumber sliced thinly
1 lime sliced thinly
2.25 gal filtered water

Juice it up with a couple of CO2 cartridges, and let it sit overnight to let the carbonation sink in. Add another cartridge each day. Keep refrigerated.

Refreshing!

Saison, Witte, & Blue

I love Culver City Home Brew Supply's Witbier recipe. It is a guaranteed hit with everyone, especially those homebrew doubters. As a result I have made it probably 5 or 6 times, whereas other recipes have been a once or twice kind of deal.

Normally I don't like to mess with a good thing, but I have had a hankering for blueberry beer since I had one in Atlanta, and since I already like this recipe and it is a wheat beer I might as well use it as the base in a fruit beer. I am going to take the grain bill (including the candi sugar) and hop schedule from the Brew Supply recipe (skipping the orange and coriander), use a saison yeast to give it a bit of tang, and add thawed frozen blueberries to the secondary.

This is queued up next in the brew cycle, once the Cascade Chocolate Mahogany Porter is out of the primary...