Cat Party Brewing

We don’t brew much in the summer. We don’t have air conditioning, so boiling 5 gallons of wort for hours in the kitchen is just sorta terrible when it’s hot outside. So we’ve been on a bit of a brewing hiatus, but at some point over the summer, I thought it’d be a good idea […]

Brewed a second batch today from the Midwest Supplies Winter Ale kit. This kit has been in our basement for a few months, so I replaced the original yeast with Imperial German Kaiser G02 yeast from Brew & Grow. I plan on bottling this one and letting most of it hang out in the basement til […]

Adapted from Kegerator’s recipe We used our backyard Cascade hops for this one. I harvested these about 4 months ago and have been storing them in a freezer. This is our first beer that utilized dried backyard hops. It was pretty messy but still fun. Ingredients: 5.75 lbs Liquid Malt Extract 1 ounce of Cascade Hops […]

This is the second year we’ve harvested hops from the Cascade hop vines we planted by our fence a few years ago. Yield: 17oz

Our favorite neighborhood brewery, Fair State Co-Op, did a wort giveaway for member-owners. They gave us 5 gallons of wort (unfermented beer), and we got to take that home to ferment and enjoy. Just add yeast, keep the yeast happy, and keg it a few weeks later! Easy, right? Theirs was a hoppy wheat beer […]

We got a beer kit for Christmas! Austin Homebrew Supply’s AHS Chocolate Stout.  We also got a very cool yeast starter kit and made a starter for the first time. OG: 1.039 / FG: 1.026

Ingredients 10 64 oz. bottles of apple juice or cider – vitamin c is ok – pasteurized is ok 2 pounds of dextrose (corn sugar) 2 packets of Montrachet wine yeast Directions Sanitize carboy and other necessary equipment. Empty 5 of the apple ciders into the carboy. Pour in 2 pounds of dextrose. Carefully, shake […]

This is the first beer we used our own hops with. We’ve been growing Cascade hops out back on the fence, and for this beer, we wet hopped with those. Recipe adapted from the Homebrewers Association’s Tank 7 clone Ingredients 6.25 lb (2.83 kg) Extra pale malt extract syrup (Golden streusel)3 lb (1.36 kg) Pale […]

We’d heard at Homebrew Con that entering your beers in competitions is a good way to get feedback, so after tasting all the beers we had on-hand, we entered the Dorothy Wheat in the Minnesota State Fair. Dorothy received a 27/50, which falls under “Good” in beer scores.

We designed this one the day after Homebrew Con but didn’t get around to making it for a few months. Almost all of our ingredients here were free samples of stuff we picked up at the conference. We created this recipe using Beersmith, with guidance from Jacqui’s brother Eli. Ingredients 8.0 oz Caraamber grain 7 […]

Jacqui’s brother Eli is an extremely good homebrewer, and he let us tag along with him at the American Homebrewers Association’s annual Homebrew Con in June of 2017 here in Minneapolis. Homebrew Con was absolutely educational, but it’s also a 3 day bender since most of these educational sessions involved drinking beer, the exhibit hall […]

After a year of brewing and bottling everything, we decided we liked brewing enough to invest in something fun — a kegerator with 3 taps. Kegging beer is much, much easier than bottling. That said, troubleshooting kegerator issues, cleaning lines and swapping out CO2 tanks is hard in its own way, but it does look cool […]

Adapted from https://ths.gardenweb.com/discussions/2632604/old-fashioned-ginger-beer-recipe Ingredients 8 lbs of sugar 5-6 ozs of ginger root, sliced very thin 5 gallons of water 10-12 lemons/limes This turned out really well! Maybe a little too sweet, but it’s been a great mixer with gin, at least. Brewing this made the house smell awesome. One thing we weren’t sure about […]

Not too long after we moved into our house, our friend Nick asked if he could store a bunch of homebrew equipment in our basement. We said OK, but he had to let us use it (and show us how). We started off with brew kits. Here’s what we made in 2015: April 2015, first […]