Summer's End Saison

So, my brewing adventures continue, or rather they continued through the summer of 2012.  Since winning my category in the 2012 Beehive Brewoff, my desire to home brew only grew.  When trying to think of the next beer to brew, Hillary was actively growing her summer plants on the porch of her apartment.  Not surprisingly, she came up with the idea to try and use her plants in our beer.  I agreed, thinking this sounded like a great idea, if we're brewing the beer, why not grow the ingredients too?  We also wanted to try out creating our own recipe rather than following a kit.  So, after some searching we found a few saison recipes and one specifically, a lime-basil recipe.  So, we modified each of the recipie into our own.  In the end we decided on a lemon basil saison.  So off we went, brewing out next beer!

A few weeks later, we bottled the very "herby" smelling beer, excited about how it might turn out.  This was around the same time Epic Brewing released their Utah Saige Saison.  As we bottled, the aroma constantly reminded us of this delicious beer, also made with local Utah herbs, from one of our favorite breweries.  As a result, we were once again overly excited about our beer and we decided, before we had even tasted it, that were were ready to enter another competition!  So, we found one in Las Vegas and sent down our newest brew "Summer's End Saison."  Once again, we won a ribbon!  This time we got second place in our catefory of spice, herb or vegetable beer.  Ironically, the first place winner this time was the second place brewer from the Beehive Brewoff.  Seems like there might be a some competition here, haha.

Anyway, we were quite happy with second place.  Since then we have also brewed "Crimson Stout," a sour cherry Irish Stout and my newest beer that is still unnamed as of now, but it is a Vanilla Nut Brown.  i go t the inspiration after having a vanilla hazelnut coffee at work, thinking "hey, I could totally turn this into a beer!"  So, I went and did just that.  They just finished bottle conditioning earlier this month and since then a few people have tried them out.  Glowing reviews from all.  Hopefully, they actually are enjoying the beer and not just being nice, haha.

Anyway, now I am in the process of entering yet another home brew comp, this one in Colorado.  I think I'll enter the C.P.P.A., in hopes it has aged well, definitely the VNB, and am debating entering the sour cherry stout.  Though I like Crimson Stout, I am not sure it's a competition winner.

At this point I am just going to consider myself caught up, as clearly I'm not doing so well with that, Sundance ended this week and I didn't post once.  So, I will just consider this my second beginning to this blog, that nobody reads anyway.