"Beer, Barrels, Bottles"



Matt... acting as bottling line supervisor

Alright. new blog post time. sit back, relax, grab a drink and prepare to be entertained and informed all at the same time. First things first. Matt and I bottled "heaps good beer". I created a pretty sweet label with a kangaroo on it and a few interesting words, but my lazyness to find a place to print it is going to hinder that label ever being put onto a bottle. save's paper anyway. As stated before, we set out to create what we called a cascadian dark ale. Something with some nice darker/toastier malt caractaristics underneath a very lifted hop aroma us west coast beer drinkers like so much. But as with anything Matt and I seem to do, very brief discussion and planning followed by near perfect execution has long lead us wrong. (not to toot our own horns or anything) With all the makings of a nice dark beer we set out a soak/sparge/and fermentation plan designed more for a stout/porter than for a lighter ale. When you make beer, so much of the dictation in the final product is determined by the soaking of your grains. When you brew beer, there is an ideal temperature range for soaking your grains to extract the proper amount of sugar and what types of sugars you extract. The Range is from 145 degrees f till 158 degrees f. By soaking at the lower end of that range (for lets say an hour) you dont break down some of the larger more complex sugar starch compounds that are broken down at the upper end of that scale, thus netting a thicker Wort which in turn makes a thicker beer. So a thinner lighter ale is soaked twords the higher end of that range while a thick stout or porter is soaked at the lower end. Matt pretty much nailed it on the soak, keeping it at at 146 for a good hour. That lends itself to a thicker beer. we also had a long cool ferment with the fermenter almost submerged in cool water. This also aids in making a thicker beer. Matched with the slight amount of Wheat (also for body), the chocolate roasted dark grains, and a bit of extract to get our gravity up, this beer is thick, really thick. And to match it, we have added somewhere around 80ibu's worth of Simcoe and Cascade hops to create what truly is a big big beer drinkers beer. Matt and I both having experience in homebrewing ran through the bottling no problem netting 45 bottles of our hoppy porter we call "Heaps Good". What are we going to do with this beer you might ask. Well with my half of the bottles I plan on sharing them around my winery, and the small community which I am part of. Introduce some aussies to BEER and encouraging the local homebrewers to get away from the coopers kits. Its currently carbonating and maturning, probably the first taste will be on sunday, and oh what a taste it will be. 
I finished putting together my case of wine. It consists of 9 big ass barossa shiraz's, a cab, grenache, and zin. I could put together two more cases of great wine from varietals other than Shiraz, but damnit, I'm in the Barossa Valley. Not bringing home a plethora of big Shiraz would be like going to Oregon and not brining home Pinot and Ninkasi, or Texas and not bringing home a gun rack and Shiner, Or Rombaur and not bringing back a bottle of popcore butter, or chicago and not bringing home Ian Fowler. You see, Shiraz is just a must(thats a wine pun people). 


Thats a lot of Barrels.

Work has been going well since vintage ended and some of the other casuels have gone their seperate ways, not saying I dont miss them, but work has calmed down even a notch more. If I have learned anything in the last week, its that "wine is not made only durring vintage". yes we turn grapes into an alcoholic drink we call wine durring vintage, but there are so many other things that go into making a finished wine a finished wine. Working outside of harvest like I am now, you see those things in practice. I'm not going to elaborate on what I have learned, but trust that it has to do with wine. The one part about being out of vintage (more out of the busy workload of vintage) is the ability to taste so many of our wines. Many of them are finishing malolactic fermentation (if they are destined to do so) and are getting tasted and graded for final blends. I get to taste a lot of what the winemakers are tasting, which is very important for me to learn/practice as a wannabe winemaker. I got to participate in a comparative tasting of 12 or so wines all in the same style and same pricepoint but from different producers (including our own) to see how ours stacks up. these are done blind then at the end we compare notes on each wine and reveal which was which. Only through lots of practice will you develope a palate to be able to pick up on certain aspects of the wine. I'm trying to get lots and lots of practice. Over the next month i'll be able to taste many of the blends that the winemakers come up with and the why's and why nots of the blending peices. Thats pretty much all for now. The two things on my agenda are starting up graduate school research and applications to various winemaking schools and post Barossa travel plans. Matt and I are going to sit down tomorrow and book a few things. I know it will consist of Tasmania, Brisbane, Byron Bay, and Sydney. Again, we plan little but execute perfectly.