I thought I would update some of you on Purple Palace Brewing. For starters it is a little project that my roommate and I decided to give a name to. We’ve both been amateur home-brewers for a few years now. We’re getting to the point to making our own “homebrew” and stop with the kit brewing. Kit brewing, for those of you who are not of the brewing ilk, is basically buying a beer kit and brewing it up. For example. Lets say we want to make and IPA. We can go to our local brew supply store and buy an IPA kit in a box. Its great for starters to get aquainted with the brewing process. All the ingredients are in the box and ready for you. As our knowledge and enjoyment of this process grows, starting to make our own beer from scratch was just a matter of time. Well here we are. So with that we gave a name to our little project. Purple Palace Brewing. Named after the color of our house, bathroom, and kitchen(not by choice). There’s a great program you can buy for your PC called ProMash. Its great for making beers from scratch. You can save your recipes, change and tweak that particular recipe with the click of a mouse. It will calculate your potential ABV(alcohol by volume), and the COLOR!! Plus many more interesting features. Pretty slick eh?
Every home brewer, in my opinion, he or she has got to got to keg their beer. For 3 reasons. 1. The worst part of brewing beer is collecting, cleaning, sanitizing, and bottling it. Its boring, takes up a lot of time, and takes up a lot of space. 2. Kegged beer ALWAYS tastes the best. Hands down, it gives you the best out of the beer. All the flavors come out. 3. Its just flat out cool. Especially when you have a keggerator, draught tap, or what have you. With that said, the next step at Purple Palace is kegging. We’ve found a nice wine chiller that we will convert into a holding cell for the keg. We’ve also found a great deal on a kegging system. For roughly $180 we will get a used and refurbished 5 gallon keg, a CO2 tank(empty), a regulator, some tubing, and a party tap. Thats a helluva deal.
As we progress and start creating our own types of beers we will still be doing the extract type brewing. Extract type brewing takes about half the time of all-grain. Instead of Mashing and Sparging the grains, you just steep the grains. All Grain brewing is the closest thing you can get to making beer like the big guys. Think of it this way. Steeping the grains is the first step in extract brewing. Mashing and sparging is the first step for all-grain brewing. The steps after that are the same. Step #1 on both ends in short, is just a way of preparing the grains. All-Grain takes up much more time, more money, more equipment, and a bigger volume. For two poor guys like us, extract brewing will be just fine for now.
With that said, I’m happy to announce that talks are in motion as to what kind of beer Purple Palace will bring out first. There’s been talk of making a nice light Lager, and now with the kegging system, a Stout. For now, what we have coming up from our remaining kit beers is a Lake Superior Strong Ale(bottled and currently around 6%ABV). We’ve got a Witbier(white beer, think of Blue Moon) fermenting now and will have it on tap for new years, and finally an EPA. English Pale Ale. Similar to IPA’s just not as aggressively hopped.
So there ya have it folks. I thought I’d tell my readers about the last of my 3 passions that I haven’t really written about. Bicycles, wrenching, and brewing. Welcome to Purple Palace brewing.