Yes, you read that right.  2 weeks ago we had a blizzard here in the north east which got me thinking; “Had anyone made beer from snow?”  With no positive responses, I decided, what the hell lets give this a whirl.  After a quick ph test, I found the snow and my normal brewing water was the same ph, so I gave it a shot.

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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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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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Saw a tweet from @THFBeer_Nate yesterday about making beer and labels for a friends wedding.  It reminded me of my wedding 8 years ago.  At that time I had only been brewing for about 5 years and was still just doing extract beers, but everyone really loved my beer.  My soon to be wife suggested I make the beer for our wedding because everyone loved my brew and we were working off a shoe string budget.  Its much cheaper to make 2 cases of beer then buy 2 cases(at least for the beer I like)

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I got my liter starter going around 8am or so, got 10.5 lbs of grain ground with the world’s worst and slowest grain crusher.  This thing is so bad if I go slow it makes powder it I go to fast it doesn’t crush, you have to find the optimum handle rotation to get the grain crushed right.  After what seemed like the longest 40 minutes of crushing grain, the brewing was going to have to wait, family day.

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