Brews and Blues Beer and Smokin’ Blues

Brewing the House Blonde

My schedule is rather full for the next week or two, so I wanted to get a brew day in, and today turned out to be that day. I had the ingredients sitting around to brew another blonde ale. My previous "ESYFB" was my first attempt at a blonde. It was an excellent beer, but I wanted to make some adjustments to the recipe and try it again.

The blonde ale is a beer that I like to brew mainly for sharing with friends. This beer is a fantastic home brewed beer to give someone who is used to drinking beers in the BudMillerCoors family. It's a light colored and lower alcohol brew with a fantastic malt flavor that you will never find in football tailgater coolers. It has a rather small 7.75 lb grain bill and the hops are present, but subdued and not overpowering in any way.

I ran a 75-minute mash and then double batch sparged to collect a total volume of 6.75 gallons of wort that went into the boil kettle.

This is one of my favorite parts of brew day... dumping the hops in the kettle. The aroma created at this point in the process is simply fantastic. Today's beer took advantage of Centennial and Cascade hops. I can't wait to try it. I stopped making photos at this point because Mike and Chris stopped by. We had a few beers and chit chat. This beer will ferment for 14 days and then bottle condition for 21 days before we pop the top on any around the weekend of Christmas or shortly thereafter...