Best. Brewday. Ever.

Buddy who brews with me and I went through the entire suite of brews we've made together - 6 of them in all. We only bottle in 1 litre bottles (we're lazy) so this means we each had roughly 9 beer over the course of the brew. Given these headwinds, we were shockingly successful in our efforts.

Bottled up the Mirror Pond clone. It had a strange finish to it - much more bitter (almost astringent) than I was expecting. I wonder if that's the result of sparging too hot? Either way it should settle in the bottle and be a solid brew.

Fresh Squeeze Citrus IPA went well. Grain bill was as planned earlier, supplemented with 2 lbs of dextrose to get the alcohol in the final beer up. The boil was pretty uneventful, but damn this was the first time I'd used hop pellets in the boil and you lose so much more wort to the crap they leave in the bottom of the kettle. I love 'em for dry hopping but it was definitely a drag in the boil. Tasted the wort - it's going to be an awesome beer. It'll easily sit in the 100+ IBU range, and is just bursting with citrusy flavours.

Gravity came through at 1.070, which was shockingly low and really lends me to think my hydrometer just reads low. I mean, 16 pounds of grain and another 2 pounds of dextrose should have had me in the 1.085 range. Either my mash and sparge were super inefficient (like 55-60%), which seems pretty unlikely, or my hydrometer is bunk. My beers have been reading really dry at the end and not necessarily tasting that way, so I'm left thinking it's gotta be the meter.

Using Wyeast 1272 for this batch. When fermented on the colder side (~16ish), it imparts -- you guessed it! -- citrus flavours. Awesome.

The dry hops will go in about a week from now: 2 oz amarillo, 1 oz summit, 1 oz sorachi ace.

Gonna be an awesome brew.

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