Winter in Minnesota already

I had been planning on making yesterday a brew day, and because it was so windy I decided to do the cooking in my garage. shortly after I started the temperature started to drop rapidly and it started snowing. Made me really glad I had decided to brew inside.

The colder weather did have a couple of benefits for me though, temperature control on my burner became easier.

I'm using a cheap turkey fryer and it only really has 3 settings, warm, hot, hotter. Hot isn't quite hot enough to keep the boil going and hotter makes the boil too vigorous (boiling so water is actually flung from the kettle.) But in the colder weather, hotter was a fairly good setting.

The second thing that the colder weather helped was getting my wort cooled a bit faster.

After I pitched the yeast and brought my carboy into the basement to ferment, I realized that I was actually going to have to warm up my basement a bit though, it was only about 57F down there, even after warming it up to 65F it was a bit slow to start. I'm using white labs WL001, it says optimum temp is 68-73F.

Yeah, winter for me means Lagers. I don't have a Lagerator, and quite frankly don't want or need one. My philosophy is Lagers when it's cold (brewing them) and Ales when it's warm! My Oktoberfest gets made in March, consumed in September.

I'm goign to have to look into lagers - any good online source?? This is the first brewing winter in the basement and I can see the temp falling to the 50's.

No Lagerator.

zoebisch01 said:

Yeah, winter for me means Lagers. I don't have a Lagerator, and quite frankly don't want or need one. My philosophy is Lagers when it's cold (brewing them) and Ales when it's warm! My Oktoberfest gets made in March, consumed in September.

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My thoughts exactly!! :rockin:

It only snowed a couple of hours today, so it's not too bad outside. I think next up for me will be Maibock! Perfect lager temperatures in my basement now.

I thought with the slightly cooler temperatures that I would either have less blowoff or maybe even none at all. I'm glad that I still hooked up a blowoff tube though. I'm still getting blowoff, but it's super slow, sort of just creeping down the tube.

Yesterday's high got down into the upper 60's here... Thankfully there wasn't a cloud in the sky and the wind was calm, so it was tolerable.

It's supposed to be in the low 70's this Saturday so I might have to wear pants when I'm brewing.... (as opposed to shorts, my neighbors don't like it when I brew in the buff)

Winter is apparently in the Northeast already as well. Northwest NY state is supposed to get near 1ft of snow from now until tomorrow. We're getting the mixed variety right now. At least I can cold crash outside...

we're supposed to get snow tonight in Ohio. Probably won't actaully happen. never thought about just lagering outside in the winter. Maybe I'll throw a heat lamp on a ranco inside some foam and lager in the garage. Although I've never had a lager that I liked so far.

gettin a mix of sleet rain and wet snow in Orange county NY right now. Temps are dropping to the low 30's tonight and this is going to be all snow by then. I wish my basement temps would be cool but the stove is going and the closet is @ 70* right now guess I'll be using the lagerator and swamp buckets all winter too. Buts it nice to get home and relax in a t-shirt and shorts and a nice wheat beer when it 20* outside