Since my pumpkin porter, which I still have to bottle, I haven’t brewed anything in 4 weeks.  A good dry spell for me.  But I heard that a NJ chain Bar, The Office Bar & Grill, was going to be having a homebrewing contest.  The winner would go up to High Point Brewing in Butler NJ and get to make their beer.  I don’t enter many brewing competitions, but I would love to opportunity to brew with Greg Zaccardi and Brian Baxter up at High Point.  With that in mind, I’m not going to give the exact recipe this time, nor full process I used or the type and amount of coffee used.  After the competition is over in Dec, I will try to update this with more exact info.

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I came up with this idea a couple months back.  I’m not entirely sure what dark unused part of my brain it was spawned from, but has been warmly received from the Beer Blogger’s I’ve approached about it.  Basically the idea stemmed from seeing my fellow bloggers tweeting about brewing beer.  It seems to me, you get a deeper understanding of beer when you make your own. But I digress, since I’ve been doing the Beer Brawl™ podcasts, reviewing beers, and brewing them, I thought it would be fun to combine it all together!  So, I enlisted the help of some beer bloggers you probably know…

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This was my second brewing of a Roggenbier.  The first was wildly successful, in my humble opinion and I wanted to do another one.  I had a couple things I wanted to do with the last version of the Roggenbier, increase the rye and make it a bit darker, more of a traditional Dunkel. With this recipe I jumped up considerably in the rye, but because of the nature of the grain it is necessary to also add something like rice hulls to it to help prevent it all turning to a thick mush during the mash.

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This beer was inspired by a homebrewer I follow on Twitter, Jamey Barlow (@barlowbrewing).  My original intention was to follow his recipe exactly, but that didn’t really happen.  He gave me some advice based on the results of his Sour Saison experiment when he heard I was going to make it.  Also, I like mucking with stuff, so I changed up some of the ingredients for better or worse; we’ll see.

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Yeah me!  Two brewing sessions in one week!  I brewed the Coffee Stout earlier in the week and now I’m experimenting a bit on a simple ESB.  Often times it is the simple recipes that can be the hardest to do well with out a lot of additives to cover up flaws.  Like the Coffee Stout, I’ll be entering this slightly more robust ESB into the Office Bar & Grill homebrew competition for a chance to have my beer brewed at High Point Brewery where they make Ramstein beer.

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I made this beer on a whim, had the ingredients and a basic porter recipe.  I  monkeyed around with the ingredients list till I got what I think might be a good or at least interesting beer.

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