On Wednesday, July 2, 2014 at Bitter and Esters’  July bottle swap owner John LaPolla introduced a randomly chosen collaboration homebrew contest where the winners would win a $40 gift certificate to the store. In order to choose the collaborators he had all those who were interested in participating write their names and email addresses on a pieces of paper and place them in a hat. He then picked two names at a time and they were given the task of collaborating on a beer that would be judged by the attendees of the September bottle swap. So out of sheer luck my name was drawn along with Sean Torres, president of Staten Island’s Pour Standards homebrewing club. Being that we were already friends and knew a bit about each other’s perspective on brewing; the process of putting together a recipe for our beer was quite easy and quick. First, I presented the idea of brewing an American Brown Ale w/ some added oats for mouthfeel. Then upon getting the okay from Sean I put together a base recipe that was inspired by Cigar City Brewing Company’s Maduro Oatmeal Brown Ale and named the beer Inter-borough Brown Ale (Sean lives Staten Island, Bitter & Esters is in Brooklyn, and I live in Manhattan). From there we made a few tweaks, scaled up the recipe to Sean’s 10 gallon brewing system, and in turn we were set to brew the beer on Sunday, July 20th.

Sean and I both hope you enjoy this brew day video as much as we enjoyed brewing the beer itself. Cheers and keep on brewing!!

Click here to view the recipe.

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