This weekend, we are officially "reintegrating" the guys who recently (Thanksgiving) returned from Afghanistan into the unit... I have missed these guys a great deal - first while they were deployed, and more recently as they resettled their lives upon their return. Out of respect for their space, and knowing firsthand the heightened sensitivity to all-things-military, no matter how well-intentioned, I have kept my distance for several months as they adjusted to life back home.
I brewed up a couple of batches of beer for the occasion - one a Classic American Pilsener that I brewed at the tail-end of last year, the other an American IPA which I repitched on the yeast from the BYO/BBR Collaborative Experiment on extract techniques... The yeast had crashed out well, and it was time to keg it up. Actually I should have kegged it up last weekend.
I took the day off to go in and do some admin prep for the drill, but I started my day in the shop taking care of this beer! Since I did not keg it last weekend, and I wanted to dry hop both beers (a little bit of noble hop character in the pilsener and a hefty hop nose in the IPA), I had to alter my technique a bit... I opted for a "hop tea" added to the keg prior to racking in the beer.
I was adding about 2 oz of hops to the pilsener, so I boiled 2 cups of water for them; since the IPA was getting closer to 4 oz, I boiled about a quart for them. While they boiled, I weighed and bagged up the hops - nice and loose with lots of 'swimming' room! After 10 minutes of boiling, I cut the flame and tossed in the hop bags, making sure that each bag was entirely saturated... When I wasn't stirring, I kept the lids on the pot in order to trap in most of the volatiles.
The liquid and saturated bags went into the sanitized kegs ahead of the beer, which I racked onto the bags and hop tea. I sealed up the kegs, and applied CO2 over-pressure to speed carbonate them in time for Sunday's picnic...
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