I have consumed a legend.

Yesterday I drank a legend. A small sample of Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout. It is a revision of their famous coffee stout (Breakfast Stout), emphasizing chocolate notes along with the big robust coffee flavor. It is then aged in barrels that were used once to age bourbon, then found a second life aging maple syrup. The final beer was 10.4% and sold in 750 ml bottles which were impossible to find. The STATE of Indiana got 40 cases, with Tippecanoe county getting 2 (case of 750's is only 12). Midland county got 2...BOTTLES. These beers are listing and selling on eBay for $90-120 a bottle...and Sean paid retail for his.

$200 for 2 here!

There were a few novice beer drinkers at the Peoples bar, who were very confused as to what was happening (and really loved my growler). Sean hands me the bottle and the first thing I do is post a picture of it on facebook. When he hands me my snifter I cradled it like a Faberge egg. I spent several minutes just holding it and smelling the glorious black concoction from Grand Rapids...allowing it to warm up closer to room temperature.

The smell was epic. Oak, coffee, chocolate, maple syrup and alcohol, all reporting front and center. The flavor did not disappoint. I think the most complex beer I'd ever had to this point was Bell's 10K...with all 100+ ingredients. CBS might have 10 ingredients and it put 10K to shame in terms of complexity. Every sip was different as I tried to focus on different parts of the flavor profile. Mouthfeel, carbonation, everything was as an Imperial Stout should be. I will definitely be more aggressive next time this beer comes out. That being said, I may be graduated before this beast shows again...at which point maybe I'll snag an eBay bottle.

So, my first growler brew was interesting. Got mediocre conversion, then had an adventure trying to boil down. My goal was 0.75 gallons post boil. I ran the numbers on my preboil and had like 1.5 gallons...crap. Gravity at this point was like 1.05 After about 45 mins of boiling I noticed it was getting low and threw the hops in. After 45 mins of the hop boil I noticed it was getting REALLY low. I grabbed a sample and took a gravity...1.15!!! Killed the hop boil and filtered some top up water to get me to 0.75ish gal...gravity fell to 1.08, which is lower than I wanted. Cooled and went to fill the growlers. Remembered about an hour into this process that I forgot to account for how much water was stuck in the grains. n00b mistake right there.

Well, found that a size 6 stopper does work in a growler, but with the hole drilled the walls are a bit flimsy. Tried to put the airlock into the stopper after putting it in the growler...shoved stopper into the growler. Dump wort back into (hopefully still sanitized) boil kettle, sani some pliers, retrieve stopper, sani stopper, dump the beer back into growler, put assembled airlock-stopper into growler. That was about 2 mins. Guess who won't be surprised to see that growler get infected? After that fiasco the second growler went much easier. Some signs of fermentation at the moment, and both are going the same rate, so maybe I got lucky. There's a couple pieces of equipment I need to get to make the growler setup go easier. All that said, a beer was successfully made, and it should be ~8%.

The Cascade pale ale was fantastic going into bottles. Once again, dry hopping on whole leaf is the way to go. So much so that as soon as I bottled that beer I grabbed two, drove down to Peoples and offered them to Sean in exchange for another oz of that whole leaf Cascade (in case I do brew the new Amber, I might do 1/2 and 1/2 5 min and dry). I may dry-hop every beer I make from here on out.

The Amber light turned out ok after cooling down and carbing in the pig. Not a great beer, but not a bad beer for sitting here on a Monday night writing this up and watchin' football.

-James