Nightshade Ale

So the massive "Blizzard of '09" struck today...dropping a whopping inch or so of snow. But, because that's unusual for North Carolina, classes were delayed. This meant I have nothing to do until three, and therefore figured I'd spend the morning brewing.

I racked my raspberry-chocolate stout to secondary today. It fermented really quickly in primary - I've never used yeast nutrients before, and the package said it would lead to a much faster, more vigorous fermentation, and it was right. I noticed activity within 4-5 hours, and it had subsided completely by this morning. I used raspberry extract to add the flavoring, and put that in my secondary fermenter with the wort. I've never used extract before, and when I smelled it, it definitely had somewhat of a medicinal scent to it - but I'm hoping that it will mellow out in the wort. We shall see.

Yesterday after work I picked up the ingredients for my next batch. I'm going with what I've referred to as my "Nightshade Ale". It's a blackberry-blueberry wheat. I didn't used to really like wheat beers too much, but they've grown on me, and I figured I may as well try to make one of my own. Here's the recipe:

6.6 lbs wheat LME
8 oz CaraPils
1 lb honey (at flameout)
.5 oz Tettnanger hops (boil)
.5 oz Sasz hops (aroma)
4 lbs blackberries
4 lbs blueberries

I think it should be interesting, at the very least. I hopped it less then I planned, since I want the fruit flavors to be apparent. What I'm really curious about is to see what color this ends up being. Purple beer is always cool :)

I also think I'm going to start kegging soon, since bottling has become a major pain. Hopefully I'll scrape together the funds and will be able to do it for one of these batches. I'd like to still bottle part of each batch, since it's nice to be able to bring beer over to my friends' places and whatnot.