Roid Rage Goes Secondary

Roid Rage 2 was racked to the secondary on Wednesday. Racking went smoothly, and the beer percolated happily upon being stoppered by the airlock.

This time, for the dry hopping, Greg purchased 2oz of Cascade and 2oz of New Zealand Riwaka, which is a souped-up Saaz variety. We don't have any experience with NZR, but as I opened the air-tight package, wow! It smells great - it's fresh, strong, and spicy. Anyone who likes Ninkasi Tricerahops DIPA will appreciate the grapefruit tones found in NZR. This may be one of the secret ingredients in the legendary Pliney the Elder...

Just my suspicion.

Expect RR2 to be bottled in about 7-10 days, and drinkable perhaps a week later.

-S

Roid Rage Version 2.0

We started a new batch of Roid Rage this weekend. We are going to enter it in a Homebrew competition sponsored by Bridgeport Brewing. The beer is due by the end of October, so we have plenty of time. Taking into account some of the comments we got from the State Fair reviews of Roid Rage 1.0, we decided to really kick things up a notch. We added a lot more hops. We were lucky to use fresh Nugget hops from my friends Jon and Cathy's "hop yard." We also used extra pale malt instead of pale malt. Hopefully, these things will make Roid Rage bigger, bolder, and better.

The Super Bee Wheat is coming along nicely. Every time I open a bottle, it is smoother and better. With all that honey, it seems to be taking a lot longer to fully bottle condition.

I started fooling around with the kegging system. I am going to make some old time sarsaparilla soda once I get everything figured out.

We had our bottle of Pliny the Elder. Only 72 bottles were brought up to Portland and the store was limiting purchases to 1 per person. It is awesome!! It is the type and quality we are striving for. Super hoppy, super bitter - but in a good way, just plain amazing. We are planning a road trip down to Santa Rosa, CA sometime in November.

http://www.russianriverbrewing.com/web/brews/plinytheelder.htm

Blue Ribbon Winning Label Design

We won the Label Competition at the State Fair. Many thanks to Pete for his fine work. The Roid Rage label was proudly on display with the blue ribbon next to it.

One cool thing was that we got to see the tasting notes the judges gave our 2 beer submissions. It was the first time we got professional feedback on our beers. We got scores of "good" for both. That is kind of like the middle of the road - not great - but not horrible.

I tried the Super Bee - it needs more time to get fully carbonated. The taste was not what I was expecting. I'm interested to get Shawn's take on the flavor.