What. A. Brew. Day. Literally an hour after I was telling my fiance how much I'm enjoying brewing indoors on my new electric system, the power goes out. Fantastic. Thankfully it didn't catch me at too inconvenient time during the brew day, but what a pain in the ass. I suppose I should talk about the beer before I get too far into my mishaps. I'm brewing a simplified version of the Honey Blonde I've brewed in the past. I'm switching to a single hop (Centennial), and only using a single specialty malt (C10). The one thing I always liked about that beer was the cracker-y/biscuit-y character that it had, so I changed 30% of the base malt to Marris Otter, to bring some of that character back. Other than those changes, it's the same beer.

This weekend there have been some big thunderstorms and dust storms (haboobs) in the evenings. On Saturday, our power was out for a couple hours in the afternoon, but it came back on around 5. Immediately following that was a 5 story high dust storm, and around 1" of rain. My fiance and I assumed there were some lines down in the area, or a transformer had blown. So without hesitation, I decided to brew on Sunday afternoon, what are the odds of that power going out at the same time two days in a row? Well apparently, the odds are pretty f'ing good. 45 minutes into the mash, whooooom. I starred at the mash tun for a couple minutes, deciding what I wanted to do. Thankfully I had already heated my sparge water, so I fly sparged the old-fashion way, with gravity. I collected all the wort in the kettle, and put a lid on until the power came back. Two full hours later the power come back. I start heating the kettle, and right as I hit 205*, whooooom. The power is out again. By now it's dinner time, so we get a bite to eat, and by the time we get home, the power is back for good. Boiled the beer for 60 minutes, chilled down to 64, and pitched a pack of re-hydrated US-05. That wrapped up my six hour brew day, that involved 3.5 hours of actually brewing.



Ok, holy crap this beer dried out. I was expecting 1.010, and it finished at 1.006. The question is: Did this batch need to be mashed around 154-155*, or did the extended rest after sparging increase the fermentability of  wort? Anyway, of all the beers to finish dry, a blonde ale is the best case scenario, other than the fact it's now a 5.8% beer. It ended up tasting really nice. Soft bready malt aroma with a pinch of citrus. The flavor is very similar bread-like malt flavor, with a very balanced hop bitterness. It finishes super clean. The alcohol content is extremely well cloaked, enough that this beer could definitely get you in trouble. Which is funny because.....

This keg of beer is destined for a weightlifting open at my Crossfit Box, East Valley Crossfit, where I'm sure it won't last long. Due to the fact this beer goes down as easy as a light lager, I'm curious to see how floored everyone is by the end of the afternoon.