The Reinheitsgebot; Live It! Breath It!

Things are moving along slowly in my attempt to re-enter the home brewing hobby. For my first batch, I've decided to concentrate on pulling off a good run of my old daily staple beer: Boar Snout Amber. This is a basic but rich pale ale reminiscent of Sam Adams Boston Ale.  I figure it will be best to have a few cases of this in bottle for the early winter as I contemplate a couple of specialty ale recipies for after the holidays.

I just got in an order from my old hop supplier, Fresh Hops. In the inventory was 8 oz of 2015 Cascade (8.2% alpha acid), my main bittering hop; 4 oz of Mt. Hood-2014 (7.5%) and 4 oz of Willamette-2014 (5.1%) both for aroma hopping. I actually prefer Hallertau for this but it doesn't appear to be available anymore. In the past I would put in my yearly order in the late fall to take advantage of their new harvest. But now that their storage bags are oxygen free, it looks like they sell certain hops from the previous year's vintage. We will see what the quality is like.

I'll definitely be missing my stainless steel kegging system and being able to do my secondary and tertiary fermentations in steel and transferring under CO2. But no matter. They were making very good beers for centuries even before the invention of the thermometer so no need to be worrying about this sort of thing now. I plan to concentrate on the simple things I can control like the yeast pitch and quality of ingredients. I've always tried to stay as close to the Reinheitsgebot or German beer purity law as I could. I states that beer can only be made from water, malt, and hops. Generally that's all I include although for my Boar Snout Ale I do use "clean" adjuncts like white rice to boost the alcohol content and Irish Moss to help with the hot break. I just pulled out for review my old copy of Noonan's "Brewing Lager Beer". Although I'm not a lager brewer this book contains one of the best technical descriptions of the all grain mashing process around and is very useful for the ale brewer.

Now to start analyzing my very hard well water!