Brew LOL

My good friends Jay and Carly are getting married next year!  Jay is quite the master brewer, so he and I decided to make a commemorative beer celebrating the happy occasion.

I am not going to make this a tutorial for all the uninterested parties but here is the brief summary.  This beer is going to be aged for about a year before consumption, so it needs to be BIG (in the sense of ABV).  The first characteristic a beer will loose is the alpha acids that produce hop flavor, so we added an overly generous proportion, knowing it will mellow out.  We used 6 different malts, 3 hops and a Belgian trappist yeast.  Brewing a beer specificity to age is not something either Jay or I have done before but this beer smelled like tasty bread going into the fermentor, so hopes are high. 

malts: wheat malt extract, light malt extract, marris-otter barley, rye, caramel wheat, aromatic barley hops: kent goldings, perle, willementte

Brewing beer is basically heating water, adding grain, waiting, boiling water adding malt and hops, waiting, letting cool and adding yeast, waiting and cleaning.  We used a partial mash technique.

I think this is going to be a malty but complex brew with some spicy rye notes.  It is going to be bottled in all champagne bottles, as well as a few standard vessels for tasting at 1, 3, 6 and 9 months.  The trappist yeast will be great for bottle conditioning and lots of dark fruit flavor should come about from the time. Epic beard picture from the cans of malt extract below.

I hope I look like this in 2050.