Jay Chilling and keeping me company while I measure out hops.
As we neared the end of the 90 minute boil we decided to drain the cooler for the second beer (the third runnings of the partyguile) We had added water and let it mash for another hour. We ended up with approximately 3.5 gallons of 1.080 wort to which we added 2 gallons more of water which gave us 5.5 gallons of about 1.050 preboil gravity wort to boil for an hour.
Chilling the Barleywine. We sort of missed out gravity by a bit. We were aiming for 1.150.....we ended up with
1.170. I had created the recipe expecting 75% efficiency, but Jay's barleycrusher and mashtun, did much better than we anticipated.
Smitty and Jay whipped up a couple habenero meads.
Yes I did say habenero.....
Aerating the wort. About 5 minutes.
One of my facebook friends who was following all the pics I was posted, wanted a pic of me in there...
Yeast starter, 3/4 of a gallon with 2 tubes of cali ale yeast, fed over several days with 1 pound of dme, and crashed at full krausen and pitched. (I left about a half cup or so for beer two)
The two gallons of Brochet, being aierated. Look how dark it is, and that is after topping off with water and a little bit of one of the other meads. The taste was insane.
Due to the caloric intake of all the alcohol we were making, plus the ribs for dinner. Smitty decides to do a pre dinner workout...or is he genuflecting before the mead gods?