So we bottled the final test batch for my friend's wedding beer, and I bought three gallons of unfiltered organic apple juice from Whole Foods and decided to use the yeast cake from the hefe and ferment us some damn cider!!!

Here's the recipe:

3 gallons organic unfiltered apple juice
2 lbs maple syrup
1 mason jar full *750ml* of brown sugar
1 gallon of water
1/2 mason jar of oats
3 sticks of cinnamon
steep at 160 for a half hour, let cool over night, came out with an O.G. of 1.070, and pitched the hefe yeast. There was a pretty vicious fermentation that occurred thereafter, and a good two weeks later here I'm tasting the thing and its SO DIFFERENT from any cider I've ever tried. Wow, the oats added a nice mouthfeel, without being chunky, there is a nice spicy dryness at the end. Its not done yet, so there is still that funkadelic fermentation taste going on but whatever its tasting good. I tasted off of a half gallon that was sitting in one of the apple juice jugs, but most of the cider is aging in a 6g carboy and I threw in an oak spiral that had been aging in brandy for a few months. Should be interesting!

Next time we'll use brewer's oats instead of quaker oats, maybe put the maple syrup in during secondary *apparently if you put that in later, you get a more pronounced maple aroma/flavor...could be BS! who knows?*

Monogamy Bock
This is the beer that we've been developing over the last 5 months. The first attempt was way too light for what we wanted, even though it tasted pretty good, second one was a little bit too strong, and some definite changes to the grain bill that needed to happen, and I ended up making 10 gallons of what falls under "weizenbock" for dave's wedding. This beer weighs in a little under 1.075, has a nice rich mahogany color to it, and smells good, even though its still fermenting!!!

I used the mashing method that was in Zymurgy this last month, where you dough in at 86*, take out 30% of the mash and bring it up to 144* to get different changes out of the grains that are necessary for that nice 4-vinyl-guaiacol and isoamyl acetate goodness MMMMM, then mix the two to get a 104* rest for a half hour, then turn it up to 140, 158 and a mash out at 172. I got 78% efficiency using that method in a polarware 15g stainless mash tun that had a mesh filter instead of a false bottom, to make room for the 25 pounds of grain used in making this beer.
More updates will come around when Monogamy Bock is done fermenting and we get some of it bottled up for the wedding. CONGRATS DAVE AND ANDREA!

Oh, and here is the business card that took all day to make.