Wired To Explore Season 5 Brews With Views Roadtrip.
For this years Wired To Explore Brews with Views road trip I drove up from Florida to explore the Parkersburg WV and Belpre Ohio area.
I had planned to start right away by touring local breweries and if possible meet up with local home brewers for some brewing collaborations.
Those plans came to a screeching halt when I was greeted with a polar vortex and negative temperatures. I lost power at my campground and had to purchase the last propane heater at the local hardware store just to stay warm. Even with the propane heater it was very difficult to stay warm in -9 degree temps and the snow fell for days.
While I was holed up in the motorhome I got onto facebook and reached out to the Infamous Parkersburg Alers, IPA for short. They are the local home brewing club that covers the Ohio River area. They posted they were going to hold a get-together at the Parkersburg Brewing Company the next month. Before the meet up I decided to take a tour of the Parkersburg Brewing Company to learn how they brew their beers. My tour guide was none other than Zach, the brewer who was responsible for brewing the latest Citrus Tsunami, a delicious IPA that I keep getting on draft.
The brewery tour was very informative. The brewery is cleverly set up with the mash tun and boil kettle on the first floor with the fermenters and small canning line in the basement. They use the classic electric chain and disk system to get their grains from the basement up to the mash tun. The main brewer and partners really did an amazing job setting up the perfectly sized fermenters and bright takes in the basement to maximize the use of space.
After the tour I met up with the Infamous Parkersburg Alers in the tap room. These home brewers were awesome. They brought their home brews to share with the group. They all had some damn fine home brews with a couple I had to keep sampling because they were so good.
I told the group I had a dilemma. I was traveling with my one gallon home brew set up but had picked up a five gallon recipe of Black IPA from Clawhammer Supply. I wanted to break up the grain bill into smaller one gallon batches. Smaller batches mean I can experiment with different methods and ingredients with each brew. What I had not expected was the grains to come double crushed and pre mixed. There was no way to accurately split up the grain for smaller batches.
One of the home brewers, Jeff, was gracious enough to invite me to brew my Black IPA at his home brewery. What an awesome experience. I used his ten gallon brew in a bag setup on a large induction plate. We followed the recipe and split the batch. My new home brewing friend had a larger fermenter and decided he would dry hop his batch once it was done fermenting.
I took a little over one gallon of wort to ferment in my mini corny keg. I decided to pressure ferment my batch but the spunding valve had been completely closed so after 24 hours I noticed the pressure gauge needle was not at the 8 to 10 psi I had previously set the valve for. To check to see if fermentation was taking place I popped off the spunding valve and connected a gas ball valve with silicone hose running into star san. As soon as I switched over to the silicone hose I blew star san all over my motorhome. I quickly replaced the spunding valve back on the keg and realized the reason the pressure needle was not at the 8 psi mark was because it had maxed out at 40 psi and I not paying attention as I thought the needle was still on zero. I slowly lowered the pressure down to 8 psi and hoped I didn’t just murder all my yeast.
To my surprise the fermentation continued and I maintained a pressure of 8 to 10 psi for the next six days. With the fermentation complete I cold crashed the mini keg in my motorhome mini fridge. It got cold enough in here because the outside temp was in the 20’s.
A couple weeks later I took my finished beer over to Jeff’s to do a taste comparison. His black IPA was smooth and delicious with an incredible fresh hops aroma from his dry hopping. My batch came out almost as delicious with the slightest bitterness on the back end. I decided to let this Black IPA age a little longer and do another taste test today.