Falcon's Eye Blonde follow up and Cooper's Australian Pale Ale

I kegged the Falcon's Eye Blonde yesterday and it finished at 1.004 according to the hydrometer which seemed awful low. I checked the hydrometer with distilled water though and it read 0.996 so it is off by about 0.004. The actual final gravity is probably closer to 1.008 which I am happy with.

I also have a friend here at Purdue from Australia/Germany and he wanted some beer from his home brewery in Adelaide,Australia. He picked up three of the extract kits so I brewed up the first one, an Australian Pale Ale.

It was supposed to also use Coopers Brew Enhancer 2 which after some googleing I figured out was a mixture of 500g dextrose, 250g maltodextrin and 250g of light DME. Fortunately I had all of those ingredients so away we went. The brew is super easy with these kits, just get about 0.75 gallon of water up to boiling, add all of the ingredients and hold it high enough to kill anything for a few minutes. The extract is already hopped, so we will see how good the hop flavor is when it is finished. I diluted the high gravity wort down to 5 gallons total and got it to 72 degrees before pitching the yeast and setting the fermentation chamber to 20 C.

We also had an interesting pizza in Wichita at Wichita Brewing Company. It was a hopperoni pizza which used pepperoni which was stored with hops giving it a crazy dry-hop aroma. It was surprisingly good, so Clare had to try it herself. We will see how it turns out...