What I did for beer today

I don't know if it's something I "did" but I just realized that the techniques for good pour-over coffee are nearly identical to the techniques for fly sparging, but at a smaller scale.

I brewed a hefeweizen kit with WLP300 as my yeast yesterday. Woke up this morning, checked it, and had to throw on an emergency blowoff.


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Ordered a couple AE kits from More Beer for summer BBQ pairing. Should have my Irish Red & ESB kits by next Saturday. I hope they get here a bit early so I can brew Saturday morning! After not being able to order any brewing stuff since 11/25,I'm ready to break in my new fermenter as well as get one of the others going too! :rockin: NOW I got something to celebrate with those two IPA brands later...

Cleaned and sanatized bottles .Bottled up my bourbon vanilla oak aged ris!made a starter for this wheat beer im doing on Monday... o and boxed up my emaw going out Monday

Are emaws anything like them ornery golf critters? After ya give'em both barrels,ya gotta beat'em to death with that funny lookin' stick...

I marked my batch sparge measuring stick. I put a notch at each gallon: 1-8 gals. I also picked up some iodine tincture at the CVS to get a conversion indication.

I'll move my last extract brew out of the primary this evening and clean up.

I think I am about ready for my first all grain brew day tomorrow.


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Cleaned bottles. How to bottle my Helles tomorrow, then transfer my kolsch to secondary and finally bottle my funky kolsch

Bottles soaking now. Hoping to bottle my MB mod this weekend and possibly brew a gallon of the the 15 min cascade pale ale.


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Soaking two kegs in oxyfree, dropped my black IPA bucket into the keezer to cold crash. will t-fer to keg Sunday...if lucky it mayyyyy be ready to drink by Easter weekend.

Watched blow-off bubbles from the only one of my four 5L fermenters with a good seal around the grommet, and was reminded why I shouldn't use extremely strongly-scented Chinese liquor for a blowoff bowl.

I'm also considering buying some oak for my bulk-aging RIS. If I do, I'll probably have to buy a third pickling jar and some kind of CO2 dispenser like one of those mini bike pumps. Split the batch into the pickling jars, fill the headspace with CO2 from the pump, and oak half of the batch.

I counted the bubbles coming out of my airlock! HYPNOTIZING.........

Livendadream said:

I counted the bubbles coming out of my airlock! HYPNOTIZING.........

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Yep - I just did the same thing. 7 days in the fermenter and down to one burp a minute.

Kegged my Simcoe/Centennial/Citra IPA using an orange carboy cap and racking cane, and I used CO2 to push the beer out. I had used that technique before, but this time I left the CO2 on even after the siphon got started just so that the headspace would be filled with CO2 instead of room air as the fermenter drained. Seemed to work really well. Now I'm kinda glad my Autosiphon broke.

I ordered two beer kits from More Beer! yesterday & the ESB got here first thing this morning. Red ale is still in transit,but here's the ESB;

Bottled my Belgian Quad.
Just mashed out on an experimental Rye+Wheat beer with HBC342 hops.
Checked my scores from a local BJCP comp where I got a pedestrian 30. Considering it was my first competition and I entered a low ABV Belgian IPA as an American Pale Ale, I wasn't too surprised and am actually pretty happy with the judges feedback.
Now drinking some more homebrews.

Bottled my Meyer Lemon Mead (not beer, I know.)

But I'm about to brew 5 more gallons of my summer saison

unionrdr said:

I ordered two beer kits from More Beer! yesterday & the ESB got here first thing this morning. Red ale is still in transit,but here's the ESB;
[IMG]http://i563.photobucket.com/albums/ss71/unionrdr/PICT0002_zpsfa9869d9.jpg[/IMG]

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Good to see you back in the saddle.

I brewed my first all grain today. Not perfect but still pleased with the outcome. Definitely a starting point for future brews.


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JonM said:

Kegged my Simcoe/Centennial/Citra IPA using an orange carboy cap and racking cane, and I used CO2 to push the beer out. I had used that technique before, but this time I left the CO2 on even after the siphon got started just so that the headspace would be filled with CO2 instead of room air as the fermenter drained. Seemed to work really well. Now I'm kinda glad my Autosiphon broke.

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You and I have very good regulators on our tanks. I have been doing the same, setting the regulator at 1 pound. I'm so glad to hear of others doing the same trick. When I mentioned the technique several trolls said I was going to kill myself by exploding carboy. Good work. Cheers

Started up a three liter starter for a Belgian Golden Strong. I love those things..

Pulled the dry hop out of my IPA after a week. Smelled freaking amazing (simcoe, Columbus, & cascade). Sadly I won't be able to bottle it until next weekend.

Bottled my amber that's been in primary for 4 or 5 weeks, don't remember how long. It's been cold crashing for over a week and was crystal clear going into the bottling bucket. Got 51 bottled beers. The sample I tasted was better than my FG sample a couple weeks ago, hoping it improves w carbonation and conditioning because it was quite underwhelming.

FatDragon said:

It's not all that bad - my regular grain is super cheap, and since I don't have a ton of space, sticking with dry yeast works out pretty well.

I was intrigued by the color of the Vienna SMaSH wort, it came out darker than I had expected. I also ended up with a ton of cold break, making me wish I had used kettle finings. I stopped using whirlfloc a couple batches ago when I had thick kettle trub almost to the one-gallon mark in a brew and ended up going to primary a few liters short of my goal, but this time around, an extra liter or two in the boil and whirlfloc or irish moss would have been helpful.

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My two replacement hydrometers arrived this morning, packed so tightly and in such convolutions of padding that I managed to break the first one before I even got the packing tape off the tube it was shipped in. I was able to salvage the mission by gingerly cutting the tape from the second tube so I didn't kill both hydros before I had even gotten them out of their packaging.

Efficiency with the Vienna malt was 83%, according to Beersmith - that's four kilos of malt, 4.5 gallons into the fermenters/lost to trub, OG 14.5 Plato/1.059. Not bad. Of course, in the endless march toward better process, I did something different with my mash-in this time, so I don't know how much of the difference was the process change, how much was the pro malt, and how much was due to other variables.

Just brewed a starter for my buddy's IIPA brew here on Monday.

Just getting going on bottling up my Guajilla Ancho Amber Ale. I'm not quite sure how many bottles to sanitize, because I overshot my volume by a ton on this batch. It was supposed to be 5.25 gallons and I ended up with at least an extra gallon. Still hit the gravity, though.

Anyway, it tasted a little too sweet when I took a gravity reading last week. Hopefully, the dry hop and the second dose of peppers balance out that sweetness a bit.

Just brewed an amber ale in my recently built Ebiab system with pump. Man does this make the brewday a snap. Simple to set up, simple to run, simple to clean. And I got 77% efficiency!

Dumped a failed Moo-Hoo clone. It was stuck at 1.030 after over a month, way too bitter, and didnt have any hint of chocolate.

On a positive note, I took a brett B starter off the stir plate so I can decant and step up for a brewday soon

I cleaned two kegs, have 2 more soaking, & filled one of the clean ones with star san only to find out the out leaked. Cleaned the poppits, replaced all o-rings (a first for me being new to kegging) and filled it with root beer. Temporarily, my desk is 5' from my keg. I will be full of root beer in no time at all! Very very excited, overly so.

finsfan said:

Dumped a failed Moo-Hoo clone. It was stuck at 1.030 after over a month, way too bitter, and didnt have any hint of chocolate.

On a positive note, I took a brett B starter off the stir plate so I can decant and step up for a brewday soon

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Really? What yeast did you use?

I brewed an American Honey Wheat.

I made a 1 gallon batch of NB's Bourbon Barrel porter, except I didn't read the instructions until I took my hydro sample. Came with two 1 lb bags of DME, and I was supposed to only use 1.5 lbs. Ooops. OG was 1.092.


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Added 2 oz of Galaxy dry hops to a batch of hoppy wheat. And I racked a batch of saison using wlp670 to secondary with 3 oz of oak cubes.

Picked up three, two gallon buckets from Home Depot to ferment small batches in! Hooray!

Hello said:

Really? What yeast did you use?

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1098. I think it was the chocolate in the wort that caused that, but I honestly have no idea. Either way, I didnt want to waste any more time on 1 gallon. I will probably do a re-do mid summer, maybe sooner.

I got the spigot installed on my new fermenter the other day. My 2nd box from more beer was shipped late yesterday. Snow today,but still gotta get to the lhbs for a new floating thermometer. Used it since the beginning & broke the top off in my mash last time. Good thing I had that fine mesh strainer. Will have Irish red & an ESB coming soon,both E/SG kits. Pipeline fillers fer sher.

Had a facepalm.

I kegged an IPA and put it on gas over the weekend. I have a dual body regulator and have the IPA on one side and a cider on the other. I had used the gas from the cider side to push the IPA out of the fermenter into the keg.

Sunday I went to have a glass of cider and there was barely any flow. Oh crap, I thought, the gauge is really low and I must be out of gas! There's not enough to carb the IPA! And I have no time to get to the LHBS for more gas until Weds or Thurs! The IPA will not be ready for tastes this weekend!! Oh no!

Then I realized this morning that I forgot to open the valve going into the cider. There's plenty of gas left. Dope.

Made a starter, with wlp007 slurry.

Finalized the recipes for my next two beers: a dampfbier and a ryeweizen. I'll be brewing them next weekend.

Kegging my Pliny the Elder clone tonight.

Brewed a Blue Moon clone for the wife, although my half got Wyeast 3944. I still can't believe what an upgrade my Duda diesel 30 plate chiller is over my shirron. And then the quick connects I got from Bobby M were also awesome, can't believe I waited so long to get those. Even with gravity feed restricting flow on the outside using a ball valve worked wonders and I was down to low 60s in under 5 minutes. I also bottled 5 gallons of my brown ale recipe.

I kicked my Red Ale and tapped a Waldo Lake Amber with modified hop schedule.

Had a homebrew. Made a starter. Bought grain.


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