This week on Travel by the Pint, we head to Dexter, Michigan to speak with Ron Jeffries, owner and brewmaster of Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales, and swing past the Flint Cultural Center in Flint Michigan.
Sunday was our first bottling day as we added priming sugar and transferred our Blonde Ale homebrew into 46 bottles. All went fairly well if you don’t consider things like a sticky kitchen floor or your whole house smelling like beer to be problems. We don’t. So now we have a 10-day wait before we get to taste our first sample. It looks pretty good. A little cloudy like an unfiltered wheat and a nice golden-amber-ish color. According to our before-and-after hydrometer readings, we should be looking at an alcohol content of around 6%. A pretty good first attempt, no matter the outcome in terms of taste. We already feel much more confident about the process and are looking forward to finding our next recipe. It will probably be sometime in June before we can start another batch due to our travel schedule but it will most likely not be a kit. We’ll challenge ourselves a bit more with each batch until we’re ready for an all-grain attempt.
