This month’s Fermentation Friday topic (hosted by A World of Brews) is about breaking away from the norm:

Most home brewers I know and read about use the standard 2 row base malt and the 3 big C’s for the hops and maybe a nice 1056 or 05 for the yeast. In my book that is kind of boring even though I do it myself. I want to know if and why you break away from the norm. Do you use Maris Otter for your base and Tettenger as the hop. Or have you ever tried using a specialty malt as a base (can this even be done)? Do you like to mix up the yeast or do you always stay the same. So bust out your out of the norm recipes and tell me why you chose what you did.

Hmm… We don’t really have a “norm” per se. For base malt, we do use mostly US 2-row, but only when brewing American styles. If we’re brewing an English style, we use UK 2-row. For Belgians, we use Belgian Pilsner malt. Likewise, German styles, German malt. Lately we’ve been using a lot of Munich, Vienna, and malted wheat as a large portion of our base too. Then of course there’s the 20-some-odd other specialty malts we use regularly. We’ll occasionally add honey, inverted sugar, corn sugar, and spices to our beers as well.

As far as hops, we do use C-hops, but not any more often than we use noble, English, or other varieties. We currently have 16 different varieties of hops in our freezer, plus a garden full of 21 hop plants.

We do often use Wyeast 1056 (American Ale) or WLP001 (California Ale) when we’re not looking for any kind of special yeast character. But just within the last couple of months, we’ve also used 2206 (Bavarian Lager), 1007 (German Ale), WLP300 (Hefeweizen Ale), 2007 (Pilsen Lager), 1388 (Belgian Strong Ale), 1968 (London ESB Ale), 2000 (Budvar Lager). So, there really isn’t much of a norm when it comes to our yeast.

Sure, we make some pretty “normal” beers, like ESB, Hefeweizen, American Brown Ale, Pilsner, IPA… But we’ve also done Berliner weisse soured with Lactobacillus; wheat beer brewed with raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries; chocolate cherry stout; chile ale; brown ale brewed with maple syrup; Belgian-style IPA; and the list goes on.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, we can’t really ever break out of the norm with our brewing, because there just isn’t one!