I believe we can carve this in stone. Winter days make for better Brew Days. Last week we ran a rarely held Sunday Brew Day. Rare, because Monday means back to work. Successful, because the Society continues to grow.

So much happened on Sunday, I need to break it up into parts.

Jambalaya

The newest member of the society is my neighbor and good friend, Bryan. Bryan and his brother Brad, are half of the band Brothers in Arms, an incredible rock band with a long local history. Outside of Bryan's musical talents, he also has a love of great food and beer which naturally led to his foray into brewing the last couple of months. He followed the Dave school of brewing. Watch everyone else, figure out what works and then jump in with both feet. So, after attending the last two brew days, Bryan was determined to not only brew again, but add something to the daily menu. He did so in a big way, too, with his jambalaya.

When most of us take food to a brew day, it involves aluminum foil and tupperware. When Bryan does it, it involves a cast iron pot large enough to hold a small child and a burner with enough BTUs to heat a hot tub. Thankfully, his transit was short. It's as heavy as it looks.

Our Brew Day food prep started a whole day before. Brian swung by and we both went about cutting up onion, celery and green peppers.

Actually, Bryan did the most cutting. I probably took more pictures. No surprise there.

Thanks to the magic of gallon ziplock bags, everything was ready for the big day…which we will fast forward to.

When Bryan fired up his burner, I wasn't worried about carbon monoxide, I was worried about oxygen depletion. Even with Dave & Drew's burners, this was the largest we had seen in action. Fortunately, warmish January weather meant an open door, plenty of O2 and not some weird mass death scene our wives would have to stumble on later…and explain.

Bryan works his jambalaya by touch, so with his permission, I'm going to work in what he did, keeping in mind that it's scalable and I'm giving ingredients by the gallon bag.

First, he fried a pound of bacon.

From there, he added the bags of onion, green pepper and celery and allowed them to sweat.

Next, he added in several pounds of andouille sausage and chicken. Both had been previously grilled. After the mix cooked, he added chicken broth, a bay leaf, cajun spices, salt and pepper.

When you are cooking this much food in this big a pot, you need an oar which, of course, Bryan had.

I think this is the first time we ate so well and early at a Brew Day. The jambalaya was incredible and made the perfect base layer for a long day of brewing. For the record, it also made great parting gifts and leftovers. In short, it was great.

Brewing

I started off Brew day crushing grain. Dave and I are in to our second 50 pound bag of two row. Thanks to our grain crusher, drill and plenty of hands, crushing grain has become cheap, fun and very fast.

I also started something early I don't normally do. Pre weighing my hop additions into plastic bags.

In the excitement of the day, at one time or another, we have all missed something. I'm a little tired of that. Although Brew Days are incredibly social, they are also Brew Days. Making good beer takes a long time. Which is why I'm going to do everything I can from here on out to "automate" the process. This, as I informed everyone, also includes stapling my recipe to the Brew Cart. I'm brewing an Imperial IPA and if you click the link through, you can see the recipe in detail.

I based this batch on several different factors including, most importantly, grain and hops I had on hand. The other factors? A high ABV and a lot of hops. My needs are usually simple.

My end plan is to dry hop with the cones from my first hop harvest last fall. To track everything, I continue to use my iOS app iBrewmaster to log my work. It's pretty slick and the developers continuous improvements keep me a dedicated user. Using the app, I can even print out my recipes, like I've done above. I never thought I would have a use for air print from my phone, but I have.

With most of us brewing IPAs, Drew bucked the trend by bringing in gallons of local honey to brew mead. He has " a source", as I perish to think what that amount of actually costs.

This is the second mead Drew has brewed. During the process, he found it a challenge to get the honey into his pot while dodging all of the fingers dropping into the buckets striving for a taste. The honey was amazingly good. I'm sure the mead will be even better.

You would think the jambalaya would be enough to eat. Nope, that's only our "breakfast". We continued on with Drew's bacon wrapped poppers.

And of course, brisket.

By the end of the day, there is nothing more satisfying than stuffing pieces of brisket in your mouth while preparing to ferment and clean up.

It was an incredibly successful day. Well, mostly successful. Brian…the Brian with an "i" and supplier of the brisket, got a bit too close to the propane heater.