Back to the Backyard

As I predicted earlier in the week, when the Backyard Brewing Association gets together to brew in the dead of winter, it's sunny outside. When we try it in April, it rains. Fortunately, we chanced fate and returned to the backyard (versus the garage) and missed most of the rain. It was a great day.

With over a year of our joint brew sessions now under our belt, we've learned some important things like serving food at the beginning and end of the day. For our brewday "appetizer", I grilled two fattys (assuming that's how you spell fatty as a plural...I find it is something you say far more than you write).

One fatty was stuffed with cheddar cheese and wrapped in store bought bacon. The other fatty was stuffed with basil and feta and wrapped in home cured maple bacon. They were both gone in 10 minutes.

One of the nice benefits of brewday is enjoying homebrews from brewday past. I recently tapped Bean's Buzzy Bear Beer and shared Hoptacular from February. BBBB needs to mature more, but Hoptacular was well received. Dave and Eric also brought recent efforts, and both were really quite good. 

Today's brewday also set a brewday record. Eric brewed two extract batches. He only started an hour early, and managed to finish both right on time.

Drew brewed a witbeer, I brewed a hefeweizen, Jay brewed something I forgot, and Dave brewed an imperial stout. As of earlier today, Dave's fermentor had blown its lid three times...and he was using a blow off tube. It looks like his well taken care of starter had its desired impact.

Along with all of the good beer we also, according to Eric, ate every kind of pork imaginable. Drew brought 3 foil wrapped, dry rubbed, spareribs. Keith brought a Boston Butt, which I cooked all day, and Eric supplied 2 racks of baby backs, which we also threw down.

Drew's ribs turned out great. I never foil wrap my ribs, so it was nice to try something different. Besides, I used too much cayenne in my rub, so Zoe immediately voted Drew's best!

The Boston Butt hit 190 on the button after about 9 hours. I cooked it on the Performer, and maintained 225-250 with almost no vent movements. Thankfully, when I've got 10 other things going on, a steady cook makes my life much, much easier.

At some point I will have to stop blogging about our brewdays. I'm afraid I am starting to sound like a broken record: We drank great homebrew, we hopefully made more great homebrew, and we ate really, really well.

Thanks to Zoe for putting up with us, and thanks to our new "Associate" members who stopped by to check out the fun.