Today we brewed the last English bitter for this yeast culture.  The recipe is another batch of the Palmer’s Best Bitter, since we finished the last batch last weekend and it was so good.  The malt was exactly the same, but we had to change the hops since we’re out of Styrian Goldings and I wanted to use some hops from the 2006 harvest.

It was bitterly cold today, so we had trouble with the water supply hose freezing near the end of the brew session.  Target gravity was 1.042 and we reached 1.043, but had to bump up the brown sugar addition from 14 ounces to 18 ounces in order not to fall short.  We ended up with a 110 minute boil instead of 90 minutes because we were racking the Bishop’s Farewell from the primaries to corny kegs.  We dry-hopped that batch with some Ahtanum hops.

On Friday night I filled a second 3 gallon corny keg I just bought with half of the second half of the Boathouse Porter, then racked the remaining half into the 5 gallon corny keg that contained what is left of the first half of the batch.  The 3 gallon keg will replace the Old Battleaxe barleywine once it is gone.