Last night members of the True Grist Homebrew Club made their way to Short Finger Brewing Co. HQ to undertake a special collaboration brew for International Gruit Day (February 1st). Here’s a couple pictures for those who couldn’t make it!

Rob (owner of Short Finger Brewing Co.), has a pilot system in the back of his shop that is comprised of an electric HLT, a large converted cooler, and dual converted keg boil kettles. The sparging process on this system consists of transferring pitchers of hot water from the HLT carefully over the grain bed. The grain bed is covered by aluminum foil to reduce disturbance doing this process.

While True Grist members took turns at this task, another attempted to equally distribute the wort between the two boil kettles.

Once the boil kettles were full, we set the burners, and enjoyed some homebrew samples (including some gruit, appropriately) and pizza.

As the boil came to an end, our guys were ready with flameout herb additions.

The gruit wort was chilled and split amongst 3 carboys, to be fermented 3 different ways. One with a lacto blend and Belgian W, another with Omega’s hothead yeast, and a third with Escarpment Lab’s Cali yeast.

Some of this gruit will be sampled at Shortfinger’s Homebrew Hangout later this month, which will be featuring True Grist.

The gruit recipe, for those that are interested is below. A huge thanks to Rob and Short Finger Brewing Co. for making this happen!