Unknown Lamer's Journal: Journal! Things! Hops and Homebrew.

Hello once upon a time people used Slashdot journals and I think that was pretty neat. I was thinking to myself: "I need to upgrade HCoop's Debian install so that I can install some modern weblogging software and do more than post asinine facebook status updates" and then I realized... Slash!

The system says I have no journal entries, but I could have sworn I wrote a few way back when they were new and I was a lame teenager. Oh well, they're probably best left to the abyss if they even existed at all.

Let's start on a sad note then: there's a shortage of Centennial hops until the fall harvest. Kind of sucks, I hope this isn't indicative of a secretly poor aroma hop harvest last fall (discovering stuff like total hop yields doesn't seem too easy).

But, hey, let's make the best of a potential sharp increase in hop prices: No time like the present to knock out a double batch of my homebrewed IPA (and I just upgraded to a converted keg kettle + 60 qt mash tun with a fancy homemade manifold = hello 10 gallon batches). Mmm... a pound of hops (tasty, until the register displays my total bill ... and then tasty again 8 weeks later).

In the off chance anyone is actually reading this... I'm not too keen on experimenting with the hop bill of this since it tastes pretty good, and is probably the hardest and most expensive thing I brew (failure is agonizing). So ... I've stuck with Citra, but I hear that other hops have similar fruity tastes, ... anyone know whether any of the non-proprietary hops varieties might be reasonable as a substitute? I was unaware of the politics of hop genetics until after I made this recipe, and I kind of want to one day grow all of the ingredients in my back yard.

Moo.