After a break of almost two months,  we’re finally back to brewing.  The beer supply has held up pretty well, but the usual summer parties and events have taken their toll.  There are still four cask ales on tap, although we’re down to the last corny keg of each.  Today’s batch was the second of the Dark Star Hophead clone, which is all Maris Otter malt and Cascade hops.  This time we bittered with Columbus since it is more efficient to use high-alpha hops for bittering, and then we substituted Ahtanum for Cascade because those hops were older.

Original gravity was 1.038, a couple points shy of target.  The chill was slow because of the 77F ground water temperature, the wort was running at about half speed in order to keep it around 70F using the immersion chiller frozen in the ten gallon pot.  We pitched with starters of the White Labs English Ale, and the fermentation kicked off around 5 or 6 hours from pitching.