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Brew Day

Weivenfest 2026 brewing starts with this one,

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Kegging Day

Mold was growing on top of the ice and in the liquid part.

The beer seems to have not fermented. The cold beer had a gravity of 1.080 and the OG was measured around 1.060. We didn’t taste the beer, but the smell was enough to make us gag. We’ll have to chalk this one up as a failure and pour it down the drain. Not sure what happened with this one. We’ve never had a mold problem before.

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Today is another kitchen sink recipe. We’ve gathered a variety of specialty grains and hops over the years, and it’s time for some mid-winter clearing out. Given the range of grains we have, we decided to do something dark. So this one is a brown-ish ale using some NZ hops. It turned out to be pretty dark. We’ll see how this malt and hops combination goes.

Kegging day

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Bottling day

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This recipe comes from BYO. We just bumped up the flaked oats to 2.5 pounds.

Oatmeal Stout

We’re doing a step mash today. Aiming for a 122° mash to help break down some of the oat gumminess. Then going for a 152° rest.

Ended up overshooting the first temp and hit 126°. Added about a quart of cold water and brought the temp down too far to 116°. Then added some boiling water to finally get 121°.

After 15 minutes, we added boiling water to get to 152°. Within the target volume, we weren’t able to 152°, though, so we had to do a decoction to get the temp up. Ended up doing three rounds of decoction to finally hit 153°. I’m using “decoction” to mean that we pulled out about a half gallon of mash with liquid and grains and bringing it to a boil in another vessel then pouring it back in. I know that’s not quite the same thing that’s normally meant be decoction mash, but it makes me feel like we’re doing cool brewing stuff.

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I don’t know what this is a picture of because it doesn’t look like the beer we cracked open in November 2025

Tasting

We tried a bottle on November 16, 2025. It tastes like a Belgian. No bubble gum flavor like we’ve had before. The honey flavor really mellowed out, and I don’t mind it as much as I did when we first tried it. I still think that honey isn’t the right flavor for a Belgian, although I’d be interested in trying a 50/50 mix of sugar and honey.