My basement fridge is now armed with another pleasant addition: Hump’s Peachy Ale.

This beer turned out pretty nicely. It is a very dry, fruity, wheat beer that was fermented with an interesting breed of Belgian yeast and was infused with 7.5 pounds of peaches. The peach is mostly noticeable in the aroma, but I have a feeling that the flavor of peach will slowly grow (just as the flavor of berries slowly grew in the Berry Weizen I made earlier this year).

I’ve recently updated my Homebrew Helper software to include the latest information from the BJCP 2004 style guidelines. They changed a bit from when I first setup the styles – for instance, Imperial IPA is now an official style. Also, American IPA and English IPA are officially two different styles (before 2004 there was only one style for IPA). I think both of these points make sense. Entering all those descriptions of beer made me thirsty, so I decided to whip up some Imperial recipes.

The first of these recipes, Hump’s Ethereal Red Ale, is more of an Imperial Amber Ale, but that’s beside the point. I originally crafted this recipe a few months ago, but have revised it now that I have a little better understanding of formulating amber ales vs. pale ales (they’re slightly darker, will have a spicy character to their hop profile, and focus a little more on malts than hops – although they are still pale and hoppy and use markedly American ingredients). I then created a new recipe: Hump’s Brain Bludgeoner – a big, ol’, nasty Imperial IPA standing at ~9% ABV and ~100 IBUs. After playing with these two recipes, I made an update to an old American Barleywine recipe that I have yet to brew: Hump’s Old Humperdink Barleywine. Finally, I decided to round out my portfolio of strong American beers with Hump’s Back-Breaking Brown – a strong, hoppy, American Brown Ale.

Now all I have to do is find time to make them all… I’m getting thirsty just typing about them.

Next week I will keg Hump’s Best Bitter and see if it lives up to its name. It is currently sitting on a half ounce of Willamette dry-hops.