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This month marked a new effort from Brass Hat Brewing. This one is essentially another IPA, initially intended to aim at a red, but ultimately looking to be closer to a nice golden hue. We employed generous amounts of Simcoe, Zythos, Galaxy & Ahtanum hops and employed Wyeast 1056. This sucker blew the lid off during it's first 24-hours in the fermenter, which leads us to great expectations in another few weeks when it should be ready for drinking. The previous couple of months included a couple somewhat hoppy brown ales preceded by a well hopped IPA. Both came out very much to our satisfaction. We plan to make further variations on the same recipes. Right now I'm just anxious to see how this IGA comes out. We seem to be on a good roll. Water issues behind us. Anyone else have something in the hopper?

 
I'd like to kick things off with a comment about the most recent addition to the Brass Hat Brewing catalogue, our "Smokey The Beer", a smoked amber ale based on a Northern Brewers extract kit. Out of all the beers we've made to date, this is the first to come up limp. The rest have been nicely carbonated and produced bountiful heads and lacing, but this one is very tame to say the least. It tastes so good that I still enjoy it a lot, but I'm wondering what went wrong here considering we think we followed the same procedure for every beer. Having tried a few, Ron & I don't think the caps were poorly applied on all of them. Any ideas on why this would happen? Suggestions? Craig