As usual, one drink leads to another… My friend Josh says, “Hey, do you have the ingredients to make The Pliny Clone?” Heck yeah I do! So we fired up the ole home brew stand and started off on another beer adventure. It was a cold snowy day in the heart of Hillyard Washington. If you don’t know Hillyard… You’re probably a lucky one. It’s not all bad of course but it’s well known for being a not great part of town. But my wife and I were young and wanted to buy a house.
So we stood outside in the snow while drinking beer after beer while brewing the infamous Pliny the Elder. It was probably one of the most fun batches of home brew that I made. We were laughing and having a blast. Handfuls of hops being thrown in at random times… Of course we never measured a thing! The beer in us told us we knew what we were doing. We didn’t write down any notes.
Towards he end of the boil, Josh took a big handful of snow and threw it in. No the snow wasn’t yellow. But here is where we came up with the name, “Hillyard Snow.” We waited weeks to try this amazing nectar. I even took the time to keg it and let it condition to make sure the beer was just right.
That day finally came to try our creation. It was AMAZING! We were blown away by how good it was. We had a Pliny sitting and waiting so we could taste them next to each other. It didn’t taste anything like it! We honestly thought it tasted better. We tried and tried to retrace out steps to see if we wrote anything down or made any notes. There was nothing! In a drunken stupor we just grabbed handfuls of random hops and added them when we thought it would be good. Josh still swears to this day that it was the handful of Hillyard Snow.
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