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Ok, I know it’s been a while, but frankly it’s been warm and beautiful and I’ve been outside from dawn until well past dusk, but now the days are getting short and the heat has to be turned on and I find myself in front of the computer again. Which is good, at least for blog regularity.

In the meantime I’ve been brewing more, but admittedly been drinking less commercial brew, I mean come on, I can’t drink but so much and still be expected to remember to wear pants… not that blogging requires it. In any case I was hoping to talk about how NC brews faired at the Great American Beer Festival, but from the 7 NC breweries (225 breweries competed this year) that ventured to compete the Old North State only pulled one award: Highland Brewery won silver in the American-Style Stout category for it’s Black Mocha Stout… there you go, that’s it. It’s a small step down from Foothills pulling two awards last year. Is it wrong for me to be disappointed? I suppose we just have a lot of catching up to do… that or westerners just don’t get our brew. Anyway, the point is there is little or nothing to report, at least not until I take my list of 2008 winners down to Sams Blue Light and try some out for myself.

So, as not to conclude on a down note, I’m gonna talk about dry-hopping. I always get weird looks when I introduce the phrase to folks un-familiar to brewing… so to preempt the question; No you should not be concerned about chafing. Dry hopping refers to the practice of adding hops during the final fermenting phase of brewing. As you may know, normally hops are added only during the boiling stage of brew making. Generally speaking they are added at the beginning of the boil to affect the bitterness of the beer, the middle to affect flavor and the near the end of the hour long boil to affect aroma. But in dry-hopping we add a final dose of hops well after the boil (3 days to a week) into the secondary fermenter. This practice affects the aroma the most but also can impact flavor adding a “fresh hop” characteristic to your beer. Mostly this is done to highlight hops in a hop -featuring style of beer like an IPA or an American Pale Ale. A friend and I recently successfully finished an IPA hopped and dry-hopped with Amarillo hop plugs. As the final summer beer it seemed appropriate to want to use a hop with major citrusy character. Cascade is also popular for dry-hopping noting it’s aromatic and floral qualities. Aroma is less important to some brewers and beer drinkers, but it’s big to me, I spent as much time with this beer held up to my nose as I did held up to my lips.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 2:47 am and is filed under Beer Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.