What I did for beer today

Trippel-A said:

PBR soak = no need for a brush.

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Whoops! Thought I corrected myself earlier. I meant a PBW soak, not a PBR soak.

gave the UPS driver a 6 pack of various homebrews...picked up a couple more cases of used bottles, gave my retirement bud a couple of six packs of home brews as well.

Bottled my pale ale (extract) yesterday. Got 47 bottles!

Finishing up cleaning in the brewery/man cave. Darn bottles keep piling up...

Picked up grains for a gose next week. Looks like the LHBS only charged me for 1 pound. Should be the cheapest brew I've ever done!

Got the Lacto grain starter going.

Also making some eisbier out of some bottles of overcarbed coffee brown I had sitting around for a while. Tasting pretty astringent, but maybe it will smooth out with some age.
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Starting research on Kottbusser ale, an outlawed German extinct style of beer. Hard to find a definition that doesn't include "Tor" or "Damm". Still got bottles to scrub.

ordered a few pounds of hops, started bottles soaking to remove labels, and packed some Christmas samples of my beer for my son for Christmas...

Doing my first solo all grain! and trying to find out how to correct for tempature when you check gravity of sparge runnings!

Opened my gifts and found 30#'s of base malts (20 of 2-row and 10 of Pilsner) and single lbs of carafoam, caramunich, carabelge, acid malt and pale chocolate. Then I had .5#'s of Summit, Northern Brewer and Warrior hops along with 5 varieties of NZ hops in 4oz packs.

Oh, and a floating thermometer... Score!

Cleaned some bottles up and stared longingly at my new brew pot


Which is too big for my stove so I now need a new burner. Guess I'm taking my show on the road. And by road, I mean my carport.

Mounted the new tap handles that my son made for me, they look pretty cool.

Brewing up a batch of Brown ale.

Dumped the cleanser that was soaking in my 5 gal carboy, added more cleanser and added hot water again. Soaking until I get home from work to scrub it out and get ready for brew day tomorrow.

Ordered a bunch of mad scientist gear so I can start a yeast bank - a bunch of autoclavable vials with caps, inoculation loops, heat resistant syringes (to transfer hot wort/agar mixture into the vials) and a heavy-duty, wide-mouth 2000 ml Erlenmeyer which, oddly enough, was the same price as the thin-walled, narrow mouth one at the LHBS. The whole thing was less than $40. Then I went to the local science surplus shop (which happens to be up the street from the liquor store where they had a deal on .75 L bottles of Chimay Blue) and got a 250 ml flask and a wickless alcohol lamp.

Always a day late, yesterday I brewed a red ale from a friends recipe.

I also took some 2nd running, boiled and froze it flat in freezer bags for starter wort.

Wrote out the first draft of the Kottbusser recipe ( or kotbusser, Cottbuser). Wrote some more of my 2nd homebrewing book, covering a discussion of this beer from history. I want to include others recipes for this beer as well to show variations on a common theme. Looking back though, it's already interesting to note that raw sugar was used originally. Or at least, before molasses was listed? So maybe using Demerara sugar ( raw cane sugar) would be more historically accurate? I may input that & see what the numbers look like?

cleaned the last of my gifted used bottles, studied about using Amylase Enzyme in the future, looked for boxes for my soon to be built stir plate, and had a Samuel Adam's Cream Stout...not a bad brew...

Having a dampfbier with white rum shooters to celebrate another day of writing & discovery. Beer history just keeps getting more & more interesting!

Picked up ingredients for my extract Centennial Blonde-ish brew day tomorrow based on BMs recipe.







Cleaned out my carboy.

I dry hopped a iipa

I checked the gravity and took the first taste test of my Blood Moon Raspberry Ale. If the flavor doesn't change too much between now and bottling, it will probably be my best beer to date!

Going to bottle my Caramel Amber Ale.... now!

Bought supplies for the next two brews. Hopefully they will both get done tomorrow.

Brewed 5.5 gallons of Irish Red.

Kegged up a Black IIPA. Turns out it fermented a little less than anticipated and gravity is closer to American Barleywine territory. Should be carbed up in a tolerable timeframe.

Finally built my STC-1000 temp controller for my mini fridge kegerator that will be turned into a ferm chamber.

Built the base of my 3-tier brew rig for brewing my beer instead trying to improvise with what surfaces I have available.

79"x24" on casters. First tier will be 26"l x 24"w to hold my burner and keggle. Second tier will be 48"h x 24"l x 24"w, third will be 24h x 29"l x 24w. Storage under the second tier will hold the propane with durock heat shield protecting it, third tier will have 2 levels of gear storage. One side of the rig will be all whiteboard and corkboard, other side will be doors.

Also prepped my BKV-BB78-1 3 door fridge to install my 8-tap beer tower to turn it into my monster kegerator.

Also picked up 3 natural gas burners that I will eventually use to tap into my natural gas line in my garage, and a .308WIN laser bore-site.

Last one doesn't have to do with beer, but shooting rifles is just as fun.

Now time for a beer.

Today I drank beer, for beer. Cheers!

Installed the base on my new Schmidling Malt Mill.


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Today I cleaned hops out of my hair.

An overflowing primary caused a clogged airlock which created a massive pressure buildup. When I went to relieve the pressure the flying stopper/airlock almost took my eye out. Rest assured I set up the blow off valve THEN cleaned the mess. Next time I'll set up the blow off valve to begin with.

Split some .5# bags of hops I got for Xmas with my brother (summit, northern brewer and warrior)...

I overdid!

Got out my map gas and solder and added some spacers to my wort chiller to keep the coils from compressing on themselves. Not exactly professional looking but it will work well.

Wrote some more of my 2nd book on homebrewing after digging out some more info on Kottbusser & Broihahn. Interesting history.

Sidler said:

Today I cleaned hops out of my hair.

An overflowing primary caused a clogged airlock which created a massive pressure buildup. When I went to relieve the pressure the flying stopper/airlock almost took my eye out. Rest assured I set up the blow off valve THEN cleaned the mess. Next time I'll set up the blow off valve to begin with.

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I live in some Southern California mountains, but work and all my friends are down the hill. First time I took all my gear down the hill to do a brew day with a few friends, I drove back up the hill with the wort in a carboy and a full rubber stopper on top, no pressure valve. I guess I wasn't thinking from all of that wonderful homebrew I had while brewing.

On the way home, I put the carboy in the passenger seat and buckled it in. At about the 3000 ft level, pressure took over, my stopper blew off, put a small dent in the ceiling, bounced off, hitting me in the head. Luckily wort didn't spray all over the car. Scared the **** out of me though.

Brewed a batch and bought grains for another brew tomorrow.

Also picked up another 1 gal carboy so I could rack my wild cider and frankencyser to free up a bucket for today's brew.

Bottling some beer from my sour dreg growler w/ carb tabs and will top that up too.

Took my raspberry ale out of the water tub to slowly start raising the temp, now that fermentation is almost done.

Made a yeast starter for my brew day on 12/31.

Made a slight modification to my wife's new year greeting on the kitchen chalkboard

Brewed my last batch of the year today. 24 x 5 gal batches this year.

Bottled the light beer that I was supposed to be drinking last week. The little guy took 40 days and 40 nights to ferment.

Pkrd said:

Bottled the light beer that I was supposed to be drinking last week. The little guy took 40 days and 40 nights to ferment.

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Noah's ale? Last Days Light? Noah's Revenge? I didn't get paid before the holiday, so now I have to wait to get the ingredients for the Kottbusser & Whiskely I wanted to get going with the ESB that needs spring water to brew. Gonna be a busy weekend I guess? I'm thinking of using the 6 gallon BB I have laying around as well?

Brewed an ESB and stored 2 sacks of grain in air tight containers