Dogfish Head 120
Have you heard of it? It's a very unique beer in not only do they put it through a 120 minute continually hopped boil, but it also contains a whopping 18% abv. The first time I have ever had the beer was a few years ago and I would have to say it didn't exactly strike my palate as something that I would be enjoying all that much. Since then my tastes have changed and the more beers I tried I found myself longing for the 120 again. When I try the beer today - it's one of the greatest beers I have ever encountered.
This brings me to where I am now - over 2 weeks into the fermentation of a Dogfish 120 clone. Paul was so kind to introduce me to a clone recipe that he ran into. Of course after knowing that somebody has given this a try, I couldn't deny giving it a try myself. Of course, the more and more I read about the process of brewing this beer, the more I was apprehensive on actually getting it done.
With the help of Tim (my sister's BF) I was able to acquire all of the ingredients to brew a 5 gallon batch of this monstrosity. All that it took now was a day to say, "Hey let's do this shit and get the show on the road." Once that day was set, we were on our way to brewing.
I got some brewday help from Paul, Chris and Ed. They were a tremendous help in getting a lot of the brew started - from cleaning up the various utensils and pots, to helping with the triple decoction mash that the recipe called for. Unfortunately, they had to take off right before the actual boil started, so I was faced with feeding the boil for 2 hours every 3 minutes adding hops. Of course, after that, I had to chill it then transfer to the 6.5 gallon carboy for the primary fermentation.
After letting it go through it's traditional fermentation for 2 days, I started adding additional sugar to the batch. The recipe was from a guy who had a conical fermenter, which allowed him to pull an amount of brew from the vessel, add sugars and re-introduce that to the brew. I don't have a setup like this - so instead of trying to figure out how to pull beer 2x a day adding sugars and adding it back, I decided to just take some water - my measured amount of sugar, boil and dissolve. After cooking this sugary substance to a more reasonable temperature for adding back to the beer, I dumped it in with a small amount of dry hops.
This process continued for almost 2 weeks, resulting in the addition of 8 plus pounds of sugar. Oh, did I mention that I had to do a second yeast start which would be used to feed all of this sugar? This was my first beer that I used a yeast starter for since I built my own stir-plate to aerate the yeast for me to make sure it was good for pitching. Simple process, but makes for a pretty much guaranteed strong fermentation to take your beer to the promised land.
I'm currently waiting for the primary fermentation to stop so I can transfer to the secondary for racking. I'm hoping that it will happen within the next few days so I can start thinking about the homebrew that I am going to be doing for Thanksmas. Things have been going pretty well with this beer - so hopefully it is a winner when it's time to crack open that first bottle of delicious elixer.
