Ok, so upon picking up my supplies yesterday for this beer, a couple of things occurred to me, that i will blog about.
if your local brewing supply shop does not have Tomahawk hops and if the teller really doesnt quite know what they are doing, look for Columbus, its the same hop, just goes by a different name
If Columbus is available in two alphas (normal and high alpha), you can mix the two alphas the 11 and 13, its fine, or go with lower or go with higher, for this beer, it wont make much of a difference.
If your store does not have Chinook hops, there are some substitutes, though Chinook is a hard one to replace... I had to go with Nugget for this beer, based on the flavors i was looking for, you will still want about 2 oz of it though same addition times too.
You could make this beer without the specialty grains, but the Cara Aroma and Special B are so wonderfully carmel-smelling grains, its well worth getting them to add more complexity to your beer, and also to make it nearly indistinguishable from an all grain batch. And considering that you wont really even try the beer until about a month or two after bottling, and all the work you put into it, it is well worth the couple of bucks
I also opted out of using gypsum, my water is pretty good as it is, so while i thought i might add just a little bit, i decided against doing that all together.
Also i am using a 6.5 gallon bucket for this, to have enough head room
last thing i need to do today is pick up is an aquarium air pump with a filter and an aerating stone, this way i can properly aerate the wart, and i will need to run that for about an hour before primary and another hour before secondary fermentation/yeast pitching, because i am using 2 different strains of yeast, well 3 i am starting with an ESB ale yeast which takes the beer to about 9-10% but give it good fruity flavors before high gravity ale yeast which has ale yeast that goes to about 14% and some distillers yeast that goes up to 24-25% mixed so that's 3 different yeast for fermentation. I have to aerate the already alcohol-rich wart again for secondary (which is generally something you try to avoid because generally with air, yeast will produce vinegar) because high gravity yeast also need air to reproduce before they continue processing sugars and turning them into alcohol
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