Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Geoff Spakes. Geoff is a longtime homebrewer trying to balance his love of craft beer with his passion for distance running and CrossFit. If you would like to contribute a guest post to BlogAboutBeer.com, please contact me.

Nothing goes together quite like a tasty brew and the great outdoors, even better if it’s your own painstakingly crafted concoction. Trying to escape the heat wave that’s hit the Colorado Front Range my homebrew buddy and I packed up the families and headed to the high country for some cooler air. Besides all the typical camping gear that is required we also loaded a cooler full of our favorite homebrew.

Two of our newer brews were tucked away in the coolers awaiting their appointed time of drinking…two radically different recipes meant to be drunk under very different conditions. The first, Meyer Lemon Hefeweizen, is designed to go down easy on a hot summer day. After a painfully long two hour drive, we arrived, setup camp and hit the trail for a quick hike…it was the perfect activity to get a quick blast of mountain fun and relax after the hectic unpacking.

Of course back at camp we eagerly dug into the cooler, pulled out a liter bottle and filled two glasses. We were greeted by a white fluffy head and a cloudy pale liquid; raising the glass to take a drink the tangy aroma of the Meyer lemons rose out of the glass. The first sip was just as expected, cool and refreshing…a light summer wheat beer with just enough citrus to make things interesting.

Meyer Lemon Hefeweizen

Batch Size: 12.00 gal
Boil Size: 13.74 gal
Estimated OG: 1.058 SG
Estimated Color: 4.3 SRM
Estimated IBU: 30.3 IBU
Boil Time: 60 Minutes

Ingredients
20.00 lb White Wheat Malt (2.4 SRM)
2.00 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM)
2.00 lb Wheat, Flaked (1.6 SRM)
1.00 oz Summit [17.00 %] (60 min)
1.00 oz Cascade [5.50 %] (30 min)
12.00 items Meyer Lemon (Primary 7.0 days)
1 Pkgs American Hefeweizen Ale (White Labs #WLP32)

Mash Schedule: *Single Infusion, Medium Body
Total Grain Weight: 24.00 lb
*Single Infusion, Medium Body

60 min Mash In Add 30.00 qt of water at 165.9 F 154.0 F (Step Temp)
20 min Mash Out Add 16.80 qt of water at 196.6 F 168.0 F (Step Temp)

Notes:
Zest and juice lemons; boil juice, rinds and zest for 15 minutes. Add rinds to boiling wort for 60 minutes and add juice and zest to primary fermenter.

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Are you a home brewer with some good recipes that you want to share with the brewing community? I’m currently in the process of putting together a beer recipe guide and would love to include your recipes. If you feel that you have a good recipe, please submit it via the contact form and I’ll include it in the guide, which should be available in the next few weeks.

When submitting the recipes, please include the following:

• Beer Name
• Category (ex: Pale Ale, ESB, etc..)
• Type (all grain or extract)
• Ingredients separated by fermentables, hops, yeast, and others)
• Procedure

It doesn’t matter if you are an amateur, as long as you like your recipe, I’d love to include it. I might even send you a gift if it looks so good that I decide to brew it myself.

Have a great day!

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As any long-time BlogAboutBeer.com reader knows, I’ve been dabbling in homebrewing beer for years. I still stick to extract brewing (for lack of equipment, space, time, attention span, etc.) but I brew pretty regularly and like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

Therefore I’m personally surprised it took as long as it did for me to try my hand at some other kind of home fermentation. That all changed this weekend when I brewed my first batch of Kombucha. Kombucha, as you may or may not know, is an ancient tea with origins in Russia, China and Japan which is fermented, and therefore has a very low alcoholic content (sub 1 percent).

Many folks, myself included, feel that Kombucha is an “elixir” which helps cleanse and revitalize the body, boost energy and speed up metabolism. Plus, it’s damn tasty. You can get bottles of kombucha commercially (any Whole Foods will have lots to choose from), but it’s expensive – usually about $3.50 a bottle. But you can brew your own at home, for about $1.50 a gallon.

The recipe and the brewing process of Kombucha is really quite simple, especially if you’re used to brewing much more complicated batches of beer. The tricky part is locating a SCOBY — often called a culture or “mushroom”, the SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast) is what ferments the Kombucha tea — but I bet if you ask around, you’re bound to find some friends who have a SCOBY to spare. I was amazed at how many people I knew brewed their own ‘Booch and volunteered to pass along a baby SCOBY for me to use. If not, you can buy SCOBYs online (although they’re a bit pricy) and have them shipped to you. Or you can grow your own using the sediment from a raw, organic, unflavored bottle of commercial Kombucha (but it takes a couple of weeks to form).

After you have your SCOBY, all you need is 5 or 6 tea bags (caffinated, plain black or green; I used black), a cup of plain ol’ white table sugar, and a gallon of spring water. I brought half of the gallon of water to a boil, took it off the heat, steeped the tea bags in the water for about 20 minutes, removed them, stirred in the sugar until it disolved and then added the 1/2 gallon of sweet tea to the other half-gallon of cold water in a gallon-sized glass jar (an old pickle jar. Unfortunately a homebrew carboy won’t work because the mouth isn’t wide enough to fit the culture).

Once the liquid had cooled to about 70 degrees, I added the SCOBY and a half-cup of an old batch of Kombucha (from the same friend who gave me the SCOBY), covered the jar with a couple paper towels (rubber banded on) to serve as a makeshift airlock (and fruit fly lock), and put it in a warm, dark closet to hang out and ferment. In about 10-14 days, the batch will be done fermenting, at which time I’ll remove the SCOBY (and put it in a Tupperware in the fridge along with a 1/2 cup of the tea to use next time), and bottle the Kombucha for 3 or 4 days (so it can continue to carbonate) and they it will be ready to drink. What I need to do a little more research on is how to flavor my batch. I know some people who have added real flavoring to their bottles — like grated ginger, apple slices, blueberries, etc. — while I’ve seen other people use extracts common to homebrewing beer. And even still, I know that commercial Kombucha companies use fruit puree to flavor their batches. So I’ll report back on the direction I choose when I, well, choose it.

Have you ever brewed Kombucha before? What have your experiences been?

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