Last days

The craft beer festival in Düsseldorf last weekend was a great success. I was only able to join Friday, but around 1.000 People came already for that day. That's even more nice as it took place for the first time and is even more likely to happen again there.

Brewing yesterday was great fun and very promising for the final beer. The two young brewing projects Pirate Brew from Berlin and Yankee & Kraut from Ingolstadt came around for brewing an extraordinary beer with us. The Craft Beer Festival in Regensburg was the place where we had the most fun together and which was the starting point for this collaboration. Now, we made a top-fermented, wheat based beer with the highly interesting ingredients eucalyptus, peppermint, juniper berries, lemons and salt. The idea is to have some kind of cocktail character while focussing on the refreshing and special character of the eucalyptus and mint.
We made a small taste test and the extract we made out of the amazing and very intensive qualities fits very well to the hoppy beer we created. Good amount of US hops will get joined with two German varieties.

Now I'm waiting for my friend Boban from Crow Brewery from Serbia to arrive as we will brew our different interpretation of a Kwas tomorrow. On my trip to the Balkans in April, I was able to enjoy several versions of this refreshing, low alcohol drink in different countries, mostly in Ukraine and Moldova though. Also East Germany has it's own history with the style as it was brewed there under Soviet influence.
The version we will brew tomorrow is quite different as it will be quite strong (ca. 6% alc.) and will get produced with a kettle sour, sourdough, a lot of rye bread and rye malt. Additionally, we will also add cherries to the brew which will work in a great way with the dark, bready character and the nice sourishness of the beer. The name of the beer is going to be "Kwasimodo".