What I did for beer today

Bottled my first attempt at a fruit beer. A raspberry wheat coming pg in at 5.3% really looking forward to see how tha amazing raspberry aroma holds up after a couple weeks bottle conditioning being off of the purée cake I had in secondary. A little late season wise on a fruit beer perhaps, but I am still looking forward t o pleasing my lady with it and enjoying one or two myself.

Let's see, I got my co2 bottle filled, replaced beer lines, cleaned some kegs and kegged my pale ale. Productive beer day!

nukebrewer said:

Last competition I judged my first flight was the German Wheat and Rye category and literally none of them should have been scored over 20. Luckily that category had enough entries to split the flight so my partner and I didn't have to send ****ty beer forward. The other team got better beer and their top three got the places.
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I thought that you didn't have to send beer forward / or medal the "top" beers if they only got there not because they are good but because all the others were crap. I have seen something about not medaling unless it gets of XX points even if it is the top score in a catagory.

nukebrewer said:

I read they were orange, tangerine, citrus but I also read about the onion/garlic. Hopefully it's not too strong.

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Really depends on the crop as the level varies and your taste threshold for the compound. Some people can't taste certain things, though the word for that escapes me now.

I resisted that urge to finish off a keg, of the best beer I've ever brewed. There might be a couple pints left, but, I'm savoring this one till the last drop...

Kegged a Helles today.

Brewed a Stout and a Dark Mild and bottled my October Ale after 2 weeks 'lagering' at 50ish. Leftovers tasted awesome.

mattd2 said:

I thought that you didn't have to send beer forward / or medal the "top" beers if they only got there not because they are good but because all the others were crap. I have seen something about not medaling unless it gets of XX points even if it is the top score in a catagory.

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It's typically done that way, but not all the time. That particular competition I don't believe they had that limitation, but I don't remember since I didn't have to worry about it. The only one I know for sure that does that is NHC with a min score of 30, IIRC. In my experience it's a rarity for the issue to even come up, but I'm sure it comes up more often than I'd like to think.

Purchased half price tickets to the local beer fest in December. My liver is already cramping up at the thought! :rockin:

Last night I bottled my Amarillo red IPA, I made a starter for a Pliny the Elder clone, and I bought grains and Columbus hops to bump up the Austin Homebrew kit from 5 gallons to six.

Today I switched out the frozen water bottles in my fermenting Imperial Stout. I love that gurgling sound of mid fermentation. It sounds like happiness. And beer.

Well,got hops out of freezer,US-05 out of the fridge,mash tun heating up with 2G of spring water,some 5.5lbs of grains crushed. Found a new use for my once ever used autosiphon. I'd used my 6G BB to get more local spring water this time. I placed it on top of my homer cheapo grain bucket & used the autosiphon to measure off 2 gallons of water in my measuring jug I marked off in quarts.
My 2nd batch of my Maori IPA recipe is underway! Fresh NZ hops this time & replaced the 3.2oz chocolate malt with 8ozs melanoiden malt on this one as well. The Cougar Country IPA is still chugging right along as steady as the WL029 did. Rehydrating US-05 in 400mL of near room temp tap water worked as well as when I first used room temp water for this a couple years ago. Pegged airlock centerpiece to the cap in 15 minutes with the CCIPA. I hope this one comes off as well.

First time I ever messed up & got mash tun too hot,like 170F hot. Damn. Pulled it off the heat to cool down while weighinh out hops. Down to 152F,added crushed grains & stirred. Down to 149,then 148. Turned up heat to no avail. Hope it gains that degree or two like it used to over the one hour mash...

Restocked the beer fridge

1fast636 said:

Restocked the beer fridge

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Dang, got your work cut out for you. Better get busy emptying it again!

Is there a jealous smiley?

Started delabeling three more cases of 750s. I think I've got a bottle hoarding problem. Brewed a 5 gallon batch of wort for starters. Waiting on the pressure canner to get up to temp.

Bottled my El Dorado single hop IPA and calibrated my refractometer.

1fast636 said:

Restocked the beer fridge

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Woot for the beer fridge.

I got my 10lb co2 bottle today.

along day .. woke up and went right to work on cleaning everything out and to clean out my new plate chiller .. then brewed a 5 gallon batch and also bottled an other batch.. it was a long day ... BEER ME!!

Received ingredients for Saturday's all-grain brew day. Tried to put the brewing process into a Gantt chart. It doesn't work well, so I'm downloading Beersmith 2 to try it out instead.

Trippel-A said:

Received ingredients for Saturday's all-grain brew day. Tried to put the brewing process into a Gantt chart. It doesn't work well, so I'm downloading Beersmith 2 to try it out instead.

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I think you will be very happy with beersmith. Give yourself these next 2 days to familiarize yourself with the program. It takes a little tinkering and patience at first as it can be slightly overwhelming. But if you take the time to input all the info about your personal brewing system in the equipment profile, you'll love it. It's gauges a ton of the important numbers in a recipe pretty spot on. Just make sure to input all of your gears info accurately.

Also it might be a small pain at times to input the info for ingredients beersmith doesn't have in its database. But other than that, and the fact it's the only brew software I've ever used, I think it's great.

Good luck cheers

Dave

Dave37 said:

I think you will be very happy with beersmith. Give yourself these next 2 days to familiarize yourself with the program. It takes a little tinkering and patience at first as it can be slightly overwhelming. But if you take the time to input all the info about your personal brewing system in the equipment profile, you'll love it. It's gauges a ton of the important numbers in a recipe pretty spot on. Just make sure to input all of your gears info accurately.

Also it might be a small pain at times to input the info for ingredients beersmith doesn't have in its database. But other than that, and the fact it's the only brew software I've ever used, I think it's great.

Good luck cheers

Dave

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P.S I like your profile avatar pic man. Is that your daughter? She's a cutie pie. I'm sure she's a great brewing assistant.

I really like being able to input my own hops,grains,extracts,etc into BS2. Even Cooper's cans,as it makes things way easier when you have what you tipically use input into the lists of ingredients in BS2. Take one thing at a time to learn the program,& it's a bit less daunting. I'm still learning,but I find it very usefull to design a beer without guess-brew-guess somemore...Saves time & money.

Checked the gravity on my Amber. Tastes nice and roasty. 1.010 on the target of 1.012. Might be kegging soon!

Bottling my IIPA

Soaking my bottles, making faces, haha

Continued delabeling the latest batch of 750s. Re boiled the leftover wort from last night's canning to make starters today, ECY04 is on the stir plate, ECY03B is hopefully doing something though the slant was looking very rough, I think I've finally got propagating lacto down, and decanted the liquid from my wild grape starter into some wort as well. Not too hopeful for the last one, I think it's got a major acetobacter issue, but maybe it will also have something interesting if I can get it all plated out.

Kegged a batch of nut brown ale.

Unpacked the haul from our honeymoon. Mostly wine, ice wine, mead, and cider. A couple beers tho. These guys are doing good things in Niagara.

Kegged 10 gallons of 70 shilling, and dumped 5 gallons of Oktoberfest down the drain. Fermented too warm, and was full of plastic/bandaid off flavors.

elproducto said:

Kegged 10 gallons of 70 shilling, and dumped 5 gallons of Oktoberfest down the drain. Fermented too warm, and was full of plastic/bandaid off flavors.

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Sorry for your loss

Finally remembered to get some gelatin for my Biere de Creme. 25% corn and no whirfloc makes for an ugly beer. First time using gelatin, I'll be pretty surprised if it really clears it.

Still waiting on my honey ale to finish fermenting but enjoyed a Boulevard's Double Wide IPA and Unibrau's Terrible

Bottled 5 gallons on English Nut Brown Ale today. Looking forward to trying this one out.

Brewed up 3bbl of Pumpkin Ale

This stuff arrived. I mocked everything up, and realized I was missing a couple of things.

Finishing up a brew day...

Our budget is gonna be razor thin for a bit. I had all the ingredients on hand. I'm a partial boil extract brewer, but over the past year I've been slowly piecing together an AG setup. Very slowly...

Anyway, I typically buy 6 gallons of spring water to brew with and 2 22lb bags of ice for an ice bath in the tub ( kitchen sink is too small). This usually runs $13.

Back to the razor thin budget...

I rigged up this setup out of parts I had on hand and boiled all of my water to sanitize it. Saved$13 on brew day...

Racked my mead to secondary and added k-meta and potassium sorbate to stabilize. 1.096-1.000 in 3 weeks. Made with honey from a buddy's apiary. This may be the start of a whole new phase of our friendship.

Brewed up a mint chocolate imperial stout today. Dropped off beer for two competitions yesterday.

nukebrewer said:

Brewed up a mint chocolate imperial stout today. Dropped off beer for two competitions yesterday.

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Im sure your beers will do very well in competition. Which ones did you enter?

I also saw you decided to classify your stout as imperial. Nicee.

Dave37 said:

Im sure your beers will do very well in competition. Which ones did you enter?

I also saw you decided to classify your stout as imperial. Nicee.

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Thanks. I entered an oaked vanilla chocolate imperial stout, the rye ipa you tried, a barleywine and a single hop El Dorado IPA.

Yeah, got better efficiency than I was planning for which put it firmly in imperial territory. Going to clock in at about 8.2% depending on how far it attenuates.

I bought my 4th fermenter, recalced some recipes I've bought materials for with updated efficiency numbers from my last several batches, and (consequently) figured out how much additional malt I'll need to buy before I can brew my Scotch Strong Ale.

Also took a hydro sample of my saison, currently in primary for its 30th day.