This August, 11 students joined us at Capracopia Farm in Sebastopol for a truly unique brewing experience. Capracopia Farm has 2 acres of hops bines, in addition to Gravenstein apples, peaches and nectarines, olives, flowers, and lots of goats. It’s a beautiful setting to learn about hops and to brew beer. Farm Manager Scott Bice took us into the hop fields and talked about growing hops organically and biodynamically, and helped us find the perfect hops to pick for our brews. The resident goat kids even tagged along with us into the fields! We brewed 3 different fresh hop beers right on the farm, using Capracopia’s Cascade, Cashmere, and Chinook hops, picked fresh off the bines and sent straight into the kettles. I took a second trip up to the farm about a week after brewing to get even more fresh hops, dry-hopping them in our three brews. The beers came out amazing! The depth of flavor and unique subtle flavors that you get from fresh hops are a real delight. We are so lucky to live in a place where such amazing hops are grown right in our backyard. We’ll definitely do it again in August of 2020, when the hops are ready to harvest, so get on our email list if you’d like to hear about it.
Team Building Brewing Session with Facebook
This past week we hosted a fun brewing session with the team from Facebook Dating. They were looking for a unique team-building off-site session, and making beer fit the bill. Alpha Acid Brewing in Belmont was kind enough to host us. Their tap-room and brewery is the perfect space to make beer, as it comes pre-equipped with an awesome supply of beer for drinking before and during the brew day. Facebook Dating brought a team of about 20 people for the team building session, and we brewed 5 different beers. We started off with everyone getting a flight of Alpha Acid beers: their awesome Betty Lite Blonde Ale, 510 IPA, Call of the Mild mild ale, and their Pure Porter. Then we dove into the brewing, with the team brewing a range of styles, from IPA, to a hybrid wheat beer, to a rich dark stout. 25 gallons of beer is now fermenting away, to be bottled in a few weeks. Thanks for having your team-building session with us, Facebook Dating, we had a great time!
SF Beer Week Home Brewing Classes
I was busy for SF Beer Week, teaching two 101 classes and a 102 class as well. All the classes were sold out, and they all went great. I love doing classes during SF Beer Week as I advertise them on the SF Beer Week website, and get a nice variety of students from all over the Bay Area. The classes are always great fun for me, as I get to share the joy of homebrewing with a wide variety of people.
Second Advanced Class in the books
We had a great class! Thanks to everyone that attended, it was great fun.
I switched it up in this class and we brewed two 5-gallon batches instead of one 10-gallon. We made a Double IPA and a Weizenbock that came out at 6.8% ABV and 6.7% ABV, respectively.
I created a couple of fun gizmos for the class. One is a manometer that allows me to teach about differential pressure in the mash tun, runoff rates, wort velocity, and bringing it all back to avoiding a stuck mash while maximizing mash efficiency. Basically, I took a sight glass from More Beer and added it to the output of the mash tun, just upstream of the valve that controls runoff rate. It's a great way to visualize the differential pressure in the mash tun and to really see how a mash can get stuck.
The second gizmo is some tees and valves that allow us to sparge two mash tuns from one hot liquor tank. It's nothing amazing, but it worked great. Some high temp tubing, a tee fitting, hose clamps, a couple of valves, and it did the trick.
The counter-pressure bottling went great this time. This is a really fun and unique part of the class that no one else is teaching. There's some pics below. Great job Marc, Kristen, and Jon!
I hope you all enjoyed the class and keep the home-brewing going!
Great Class
We had a great class this past Saturday. Everyone made great beer!
