Category: homebrewing
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brew day
Live-Blogging Brew Day! The Queen has commanded that the next beer I brew be a vanilla porter, so that’s what’s on the agenda today. I looked up recipes for vanilla porters on teh intarwebs because I assumed there must be something special about them, but there’s not. They’re all just recipes for porters with a Read.
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Batch #7 Bottled!
Batch #7 is bottled! For the first time in a fortnight, the fermenters are empty and I can see the top of the workbench. This has got to be the darkest beer I’ve ever brewed. The end of the siphon I use to get the brew out of the big five-gallon bottle it was fermenting Read.
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Batch #6 bottled!
Batch #6 is bottled! I wasn’t sure I’d have enough time to bottle tonight, but I knew I’d have enough time to wash three dozen bottles, so I filled up the sink with warm, soapy water, got the brush down from its hook and got wet. There’s no way to wash that many bottles without Read.
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L’chaim!
Tasting day! It’s Batch #5 and it’s one hell of a lot more bitter than I thought it would be. I knew the Northern Brewer hops I used were high alpha acid, but I thought that, if I boiled them for just a short time, the brew wouldn’t end up bitter. Wrong. Live and learn. Read.
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thanks
Oh yay. Two batches of beer going at the same time: a Belgian abbey on the left and a stout on the right. The abbey is Batch #6, the slow-starter I was fretting over for two days until I finally got fermentation kickstarted by giving it a warm bath. Now it’s got a heating pad Read.
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bubbly batch
Same batch, eight hours later: I kept thinking about the head of kreusen building on top of the wort as I was trying to read myself to sleep last night. Finally, I gave up, got out of bed and stuck the blow-off tube down the neck of the carboy. Good thing I did, because the Read.
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LIFE!
LIFE, DO YOU HEAR ME! GIVE MY CREATION … LIIIIIFE! Last time I used this particular strain of yeast it took a little more than twenty-four hours for fermentation to kick in. This time it took almost fifty-four, and I had to baby it. I thought it might be too cold in the basement for Read.
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Batch #6
Batch #6 is brewed and put to bed. Now to wait for the good part. Read.
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Batch #5
Bottling Day! This is Batch #5, which I had hoped would be a less-hoppy beer than any of my previous brews — “less hoppy” meaning “a beer that My Darling B would drink.” I cut the amount of hops in half so the brew wouldn’t taste nearly as bitter as the previous batches, not counting Read.
This Is Drivel 