So many updates...

So rather than actually make all the postings I would like to in this post I am just going to give a quick overview of the few to come soon.

1. My trip to Napa Valley and the northern California region.  Complete with wine tastings, beer tastings, transvestites, Madden and even a skunk.
2. My brown ale. It was bottled a little over a week ago, it has been a little disappointing but hopefully a few more weeks should mellow it out some. Much more on that to come.
3. My sessionable Belgian IPA. Just brewed and not even dryhopped yet.
4. Tastings: Re-Tasting one or more of my older homebrews to see how flavors have changed over half a year or so and maybe throwing in a few prime tastings of commercial beers I have particularly liked (e.g. my two new summer favorites: Anderson Valley Summer Solstice and Heavy Seas Summer Ale).
5. Probably lots of other things I haven't gotten to but hopefully good stories and a pic or two to make them worthy of this blog.

Additionally I will simply post here my next planned brew (following the finish of the Belgian IPA). It is titled Here Be Dragons! and is intended to have some characters of an Old Ale, Winter Warmer and a Strong Scotch Ale.  I am additionally contemplating on breaking off part of the batch to turn into other "Dragons". A few ideas so far have been.

• Here Be White Dragons: Bottled with a spice tea of coriander and bitter orange
• Here Be Red Dragons: Bottled with a spice tea of cinnamon and sweet orange
• Here Be Black Dragons: Bottled with coffee and/or black pepper
• Here Be Green Dragons: Bottled with herbs, likely heather tips.

These are all very preliminary ideas which I will be working on as the brew date, and bottling date, get closer though I plan on fermenting this for quite some time and expect to brew it in August to be done sometime next winter or early spring.

edits: After looking more into these ideas I am still very excited about them. I tried a mix of coffee, vanilla and pepper tonight and it worked surprisingly well (like Kahlua with a bit of a bite).  That coupled with the description of Belhaven Brewery's Wee Heavy as having "Gentle, fresh cracked pepper spiciness" by Draft magazine and alternatively Old Curmudgeon (an Old Ale) having this review: "The big bursting bubbles above this deep golden brew exude intense black pepper spice, cinnamon and cedarlike hops."  These sere to make Black Dragons much more tempting. Additionally the realization that Jacobite Ale is spiced with coriander makes the White Dragons seem much more appropriate. I'm thinking now that these 4 sets of ingredients will certainly be tried at bottling time, potentially with one or two additional variants.

Upcoming Beers

So I told myself over and over I would not post a recipe to this blog until it was 100% set and I had either brewed it or was just about to. Well this seems close enough so here it goes.
I recently ordered the ingredients for two batches of beer I plan on making and will brew one this weekend (or during the week depending on when it shows up) and the other sometime in the next month:

1. Saison Nouvelle: This is intended to be an amber colored Saison style beer with light orange flavor from orange peel additions, lemony and tropical fruit flavor from citra hops and spicy character  from the hops.
2. Pumpkin Beer: Like the saison this recipe also uses 6 lbs of amber lme, 1.5 lbs wheat dme and .5 lbs caravienne but will utilize much lower amount of hops (1 oz. Mt. Hood for 60 minutes) and a fairly neutral yeast character (Nottingham). The main flavors here come from the 2 lbs of roasted canned pumpkin and pumpkin spices (1 tsp pumpkin pie spice + .5 tsp cinnamon + 1 tsp nutmeg).  Half of the batch will have cold brewed pumpkin spice coffee added at bottling time to make a Coffee Pumpkin Ale which, as far as I can tell from my web searches, has not been done before? Doesn't seem possible with the wildly imaginative brewers out there but maybe theres a good reason for it, we shall see.

I'm not sure what order these will be brewed in...the Saison Nouvelle will likely require greater time in carboy (~1 month) and higher temps (>70) which would seemingly make it more fit to be done second.  It however is a recipe I REALLY want to do so we'll see on brewday which I decide to go with.