I’ve renamed my Strong IPA from ‘Dry Hump’ to ‘Mini Lhop.’ The new name is a little less vulgar so I’m not quite as worried about serving it at the conference this summer or trying to explain the name to my parents. The label for Mini Lhop has a drawing of Fuzz Butt, our pet rabbit, who was a black ‘not so mini’ lop.

The label itself has a few changes. I added the ABV and the IBU and changed the ‘Brewed and Bottled by . . .’ section to show our web address instead. I like printing the ABV, but I’m not sure about the other change. Here is the IPA label, let me know what you think.

Also, you can check out the updated Scotch Ale Label if you’d like.

- Chris

I have a new domain, harleybrewing.com. Of course, I’ll be keeping the beerios domain and they will both point to the same place. You may notice some changes to the site over the next few weeks though. I’m going to change all of the Harley House stuff over to Harley Brewing. I’m also thinking about dropping the hotelharley domain. Eventually I need to update the wordpress theme to look a little nicer and make navigation easier, but that might not happen for along time. For now, re-branding is enough.

On the topic of branding, we’ve complete a few more labels and updated the Scotch Ale label. We’re trying to keep most of the label the same for each beer and only alter the main image and descriptions. Aside from the Scotch Ale, we’ll probably use the same fonts on each label as well. I’m not sure if I prefer the hand sketch labels from a friend of mine, or the solid lines of the images Cindy created. Thoughts?

I did change the ‘Insert some other crap . . .’ part of the label, but I tried to keep it a little snarky. Is the change good?

Here is the Beerios label with some of the template changes:

I’ll post more labels as we make them and eventually create a gallery page for all of them.

- Chris

Last weekend I bottled the DoppelBock with a little help from my Brother. I think it’s going to be a wonderful beer once it carbonates and ages. This weekend, Cindy and I bottled the IPA and Beerios that we’re sending to the conference this summer. These aren’t very different from previous iterations, but I am beginning to wonder if my IPA should be a little more bitter. I certainly like it, but I have been drawn to more beers with 80+ IBU lately, and our is only 55. That’s still rather bitter for anyone not fond of the IPA. I did manage to get the color back to where I want it, which is good. In the beerios, we changed one of the oat additions from golden naked oats to flaked oat. I think the change is good, but I’ll hold back a couple of bottle to compare to the previous batch. Also, when I brew my next batch I think I am going to switch to malted oat instead of the flaked oats, just to compare the differences.

We racked the Porter and the Rye, which we plan to send to the conference as well. The Porter is exactly what I wanted, a dark slightly roasted beer with a light body. The Rye Beer tastes like beer. I didn’t really notice the rye flavor and other than that, it’s a rather plain beer. Not bad, but nothing special either. We’ll bottle these next weekend.

After all of that, we still have about 60 empties on the shelf thanks to friends and family who have given me bottles and drank a few of my beers. I still have 10 more gallons of beer to bottle for the conference, as well as 10 more gallons for personal use. That’s 200 bottles over the next 6 weeks, and I’ll be brewing another 100 bottles worth of beer in a few weeks. For now, I really just need another 40 bottles by Sunday for the Porter and the Rye Beer, but I could really use some more for those other batches.

To that end, we are having a small party this Saturday. We’ll be playing video games, emptying bottles, and hopefully feasting on some bbq pork sandwiches.

- Chris

So, we’ve finally designed our first label. We’re not actually brewing a Scotch Ale for the conference this summer, but it seemed like a reasonable label to start with. It will probably become one of our staple beers, but I may have to back off on the smoke a little bit. We’ll see how well received a less smokey Scotch Ale is at the end of the summer.

Here is the label:

Any thoughts from our 2 readers?

- Chris

We did a little bottling over the weekend. We bottled the Munich Lager and finally got the lingering batch of Agave Mead into bottles as well. The Munich is going to be a wonderful lager and I am looking forward to trying a properly conditioned bottle next week. The Agave Mead is also good, very similar to the one I made a couple batches ago. So, why the title of Swill?

A little over a year ago, I tried my hand at making Grape Wine. I chose a Muscat concentrate from Williams, although I had never had muscat wine. I used the same process that I use for Mead, which produces a mead that everyone seems to love. I fermented it until it was ‘done’ and kept racking it until it was clear. Actually, I used some Sparkaloid after 6 months of racking because it wasn’t clearing up. Anyhow, I eventually bottled it and split the batch with my Brother.

After leaving it in the bottle for 6 months, I finally tasted it. It was awful. I thought it might get better with time, so I tried it again at Easter. Nope, still bad. It’s drinkable and doesn’t contain any of the off flavors that would normally accompany mold or bacterial contamination, but it tastes bad. It tastes a bit like altar wine, which leads me to the conclusion that I should have taken gravities a little more often near the end of fermentation and added some sulfites to stop fermentation at the appropriate time. I have since tried other muscat wines, and they are not nearly as harsh as my version. Anyhow, I don’t plan to try my hand at grape wine again and I have dubbed this stuff ‘Swill.’

This weekend I wanted to put some of the mead in some of my favorite wine bottles, so I had to move some of the swill into other bottles. I had a number of Champagne bottles that I can cap, so I moved 8 of the 11 bottles of swill into those. I was tempted to just pour the stuff out, but I have trouble wasting intoxicating beverages, even if they are bad. So, if anyone would like a whole lot of swill, you’re welcome to take some with you the next time we meet.

- Chris