Gilbert Obadiah's Thunderbrew

Labor Day weekend was one of those odd three day weekends where I tend to over extend myself. There were two brew days, a day with the smoker and a family party just for the siblings. Believe it, there was beer, fire, a little bleeding and plenty of eats.




In my opinion one of the first "extra" expenditures that any brewer should make to ease their day is a wort chiller. For example there's no way am I chilling a 5 gallon brew from boil to pitching temp in the sink with ice.

I picked my chiller up from Northern Brewer for a reasonable rate. One thing I found you should do when ordering with flat-rate shipping is to make sure you squeeze every last cent out of that shipping allowance. This is where the Gilbert Obadiah's Thunderbrew comes into play. The American wheat all-grain kit is embarrassingly cheap to get from them (<$20) so I tossed it in with my chiller order for good measure. I called it a "practice wheat" in my head.

I have read horror stories about using wheat as part of the grist causing stuck sparges, but I really had no issues with this. I just vorlaufed pretty slowly and I got good runoff. Granted this is my only wheat beer so far and there's only 8 lbs of grain in the mash tun.

Anyway, it was a rainy day when I brewed on Sept 3rd. I mean it started out OK and there was a bit of wind, but for the most part I was listening to the Hawkeyes game and just trying to stay in the garage out of the soak. My poor friends down in Iowa City who were tailgating at the game were getting drenched. The thunder and lightning started when I was mashing in and so was born Gilbert Obadiah's Thunderbrew. Gilbert Obadiah was lovely Sara's maternal great-grandfather who was an immigrant from Sweden. He always said it "tunder and lightning" in the Swedish accent so I'm told. No soft "H" in Swedish I suppose.

Iowa won that day and so did I, coming away with 5 1/8 gallons of 1.048 wort which ended up down to 1.011 for a 4.8%  ABV brew.

I bottled up two cases, but haven't drank much of it. It's a favorite for me to give away because everyone else likes it. For my own tastes I prefer a hefeweizen or something with more character. US-05 doesn't really add anything to a basic brew like this. That said, it wasn't at all bad, just not really all that special. I may have a few bottles tucked away down in the recesses of the pantry for a tasting in the future if I get around to it.

You can get the recipe kit from Northern Brewer here.

Sunday Sept 4th was a nice party with family and some pulled pork sandwiches with the fixings and tonka pies/smores over the fire for dessert. There was lots of food. For some sidelong entertainment one of the nephews bloodied his lip pretty good falling off one of my hammocks. His face broke the fall fairly well so my lawn didn't get hurt too badly. Good thing for him his mom's a nurse and his dad's an EMT.

The next brew day was the Monday of Labor Day 9-5, but that's another post.