Tomorrow-Land

jay and i brewed again on sunday... which provided a welcome respite from the horrible season the eagles are having (they lost another humiliating game to the giants that day). anyway, we ended up brewing James Bond Porter (an english-style porter, for lack of a better name) and transferring batch #3, Badass IPA into the other carboy for its secondary fermentation/conditioning.

anyway, we're really optimistic about both of these beers. the porter will be great, we hope. for this batch we used a combination of malt extract, chocolate malt, roasted barley and black patent malt to give the wort a nice black color. then we added fuggles hops for bittering and two additions of east kent goldings hops for bittering and aroma.

we also used a liquid yeast... white labs WLP013 London Ale, which should give the beer a nice "english" character and complexity. we also did our first yeast starter, which is the process of adding the yeast ahead of brewing day to a small wort, which allows the viable yeast cells to multiply and results in a better fermentation. it must've worked, because when i talked to jay yesterday, he said the porter was bubbling away like mad.

there's even the possibility that we might go for batch 5 right away. we might actually repitch more wort right on top of the yeast cake from the porter. yeast are living critters, so as long as they're still viable, you can reuse the same batch of yeast for multiple beer batches. professional brewers some times reuse a yeast cake as many as 10 times before pitching fresh yeast.