We have bottled the Harpoon IPA clone and it tasted fabulous out of the carboy. If it tastes as good once it carbonates, it will be amongst our better beers. Lots of malt up front and then ... wham ... hops! Just my kind of beer.

We drank many pints of Shiner Bock on our recent Texas vacation. Lance Armstrong's favorite beer is certainly a great one.

We just bottled our Old Peculiar and Fuller's ESB. We should know in another week the results, but they tasted good out of the carboy, so I'm pretty excited. Note: Just tried them and they are super! The Old Peculiar conjours memories of sitting in the 2nd highest pub in England by a nice fire with friends. Hard to be disappointed in a beer that brings back those sorts of recollections!

We made our first foray into kegging recently. Rather than going all-out and going with Cornelius kegs, we opted for the Party Star Mini-Keg system from Germany. Thankfully, mini-kegging relies on our favorite method of carbonation, cask conditioning. When kegged, a small amount of corn sugar is added to the beer. Once the cask is sealed, the yeast uses the sugar and produces CO2, naturally carbonating the beer, and producing "Real Ale".

We kegged our Ancient Spotted Chicken, a clone of one of our favorite beers, Old Speckled Hen from the UK. We've had it on draught in London before and it is wonderful. While it is available in cans in the US, nothing beats it fresh. While a afficianado of OSH would not be fooled, our result turned out fabulous.

Other recent beers that we have produced have included a Chocolate-Coffee Stout that contained Ghiaderlli chocolate and fresh-roasted coffee. We also made an IPA that turned out to be our best beer produced in 8 years of home-brewing. Other recent beers included an Oktoberfest and a Weiss beer.

Our latest beer is below. We cleaned out left-over ingredients to make the following:

Garbage Pale Ale
1/2# British Light Crystal Malt
1/4# British Pale Malt
2# Light Dry Malt Extract
3.5# John Bull Light Hopped Malt Extract
3.5# John Bull Amber Malt Extract
2.5 oz Fuggles Hops
1.5 oz Kent Goldings Hops
1 vial White Labs British Ale Yeast

Bring grains to boil in 2.5 gal water. Remove grains and add Malt Extracts. Add 1 oz Fuggles and 1/2 oz Kent Goldings and boil for 50 minutes. Add 1/2 oz Fuggles and 1/2 oz Kent Goldings and boig for 8 minutes. Add 1/2 oz Fuggles and boil two additional minutes. Remove from heat and pour into fermenting bucket with 2.5 gal water. Cool to 80 degree and pitch yeast. Ferment for one week. Rack to secondary, adding 1/2 oz Kent Goldings hops. Ferment 2 additional weeks. Bottle. Age. Drink.