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Brewing In San Miguel Part II

Living in Mexico, time goes like turning pages. I don't know the date without consulting my calendar and only consider the time when I have to get down to Cerveza De San Miguel to spend another all day brew session. The system is only big enough to do 7.5 gallons at a time so we start early and crank out three back to back brews. While one is boiling the next batch is going in the mash tun and the third is getting weighed and milled. Tuesday we brewed half keg of Serrano chili beer and a full keg of Honey ale and yesterday, a keg of hefeweizen and half a keg of chili beer.

I'm doing this twice a week now in addition to the kegging and it's wearing badly on me. the hobby of brewing for myself is typically a twice a month activity in a relaxed and pleasant pace. I normally mill all the grain and weigh out the hops the night before and have the brewing water in the kettles so that on brew day I can simply fire up the burners, pour myself a pint and enjoy the day. Brewing as I am now is more like work. No me gusta trabajo.

The up side is that with the aggressive brewing schedule we're beginning to get some inventory in the walk-in cooler which should give the beer some chance to age a bit before being served. In all of this my hope is that Cerveza de San Miguel will gain some exposure as a good micro (nano?) brewery and the business will grow. It would be satisfying to think that I had some impact on their success.



Beer Closet
In the mean time, I enjoyed sitting down with Noren at 'El Burrito Bistro' last week to have her taste some of my homebrew and she is coming up with a three course meal to pair the beer with again this year. I have enough beer to serve 60 people. The tentative date is March 21st. and I've come up with a Pale ale with honey, Weizenbock and a double IPA. The weizenbock and IIPA both come in at 8% abv.
I think I'll go have one now.
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