beer.

i picked up the ingredients for my next beer.

this will be my fifth beer, and also my third beer that was not a "kit" beer, and my second beer for which i created the recipe myself. i already thought up a name, namely EPA, erisian pale ale, on account of the following five facts:

1 - it's the first beer that i've brewed since admitting i'm a discordian
2 - it's my fifth beer
3 - it's the third non-kit beer and the second self-made-recipe beer, which also makes 5
4 - i'm using white labs yeast #23
5 - it's intended to be a pale ale

i expect to learn a lot from this experiement, on account of the following five facts:

1 - it's been fargen hot here lately
2 - yeast doesn't like fargen hot
3 - it's been fargen hot here lately
4 - yeast doesn't like fargen hot
5 - things may go wrong or it may not come out as intended

all my other beers have tended toward dark and fruity, intentionally. this one i wanted to be light and crispish, with lots of toasty malt and no fruit. sadly, it seems, the effects of heat on yeast is to bring out banana-y flavors. now, that's precisely what i was aiming for in the last two brews, but for this one, i wanted none of that.

so, we'll see how it comes out, and more importantly, whether it comes out all over my floor. and as always, we'll learn from my mistakes and make a better beer next time.

i thunk to myself as i drove away from the homebrew store that i tend to prefer to play rather than obsess about the beer, meaning i don't know much about gravities and attenuation and flocculation and all the other ations associated with brewing, yet the beers i make come out pretty good, and the first time i went out on my own to craft a recipe, it came out not only pretty good, but pretty darn close to exactly how i had expected it to taste. in other words, i seem to kinda know what i'm doing, intuitively. i likes that.