American Homebrewers Association Rally at Surly Brewing Company

Yesterday @RealBigHuge and I attended the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) Rally at the Surly Brewing Company in Brooklyn Center, MN. I got a discounted membership into the AHA for $33 and best of all was the free wort!

For those who don't know what "wort" is, wort is a sweet liquid made from mashing hot water with malt and hops. In other words, wort is unfermented beer. Thank you to the folks at Surly, Mid Country Malts, and Northern Brewer for supplying the wort for us homebrewers!

Here is the wort recipe from Surly:

Surly / AHA Rally Beer Recipe
82% Canada Malting Pale Ale Malt
10.8% Fawcett Brown Malt
3.6% Dark Candi Syrup
1.8% Fawcett Crystal 85L
1.8% Fawcett Dark Crystal 120L
Bittering Hops - Columbus
Whirlpool/Aroma Hops -Willamette
OG 21 ~ 1.087 gravity
IBU 64

So all I needed to do was pitch a yeast into my carboy. I decided to go with a Wyeast Burton Ale yeast. Here is a description of Burton Ale yeast:

WL023 Burton Ale Yeast: From the famous brewing town of Burton upon Trent, England, this yeast is packed with character. It provides delicious subtle fruity flavors like green apple, clover honey and pear. Great for all English styles, IPA’s bitters, pales. Excellent in porters and stouts.

I wanted a yeast with a complex flavor profile to balance out how sweet this beer is likely going to be. Depending on how well the fermentation process goes, this beer should finish at approximately 8.5% alcohol content by volume!

I also bought oak cubes at Midwest Homebrewing yesterday and plan on soaking these in whiskey or bourbon. I will then place the soaked oak cubes in the secondary fermenation vessels for the last two weeks or so.

A beer with subtle hints of Jack Daniels perhaps? Say it isn't so... Pictures to follow as the fermentation process begins.