So I don't know if I'm not the only one who has done this but I figured I'd share my most recent lesson in homebrewing.
My life is pretty busy... I know everyone's is but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I beat the majority of the population in absolute productivity/efficiency of my time. That said, I know there's always room for improvement (but that's a whole other thread...) and hanging out on a forum may slow down said efficiency but its Saturday and I want to share this
.
So my last brew day was July 3rd. My brewing time has come to a crawl. So I decided that to help be more efficient, I would brew 2 ten gallon batches to make up for my lack of time. Unfortunately, my brother, who I usually brew with, was planning on going camping with his family over the 4th of July weekend. I've only brewed one other time by myself and - while doable- is so much easier to do and keep on track and take good notes with two people. So, to recap; I'm brewing by myself and doing 2 totally different (and brand new) AG recipes in one setting, by myself... A steam beer and a Wee Heavy.
Overall, everything went well, and I hit most of my numbers (I used an old bag of brown malt that I figured wouldn't fully mash but I knew that going in) but by the time I got done, I was going on 10.5 hrs so I was getting fairly loopy. - Not drunk, just ready for the damn day to be done. I finally put the four containers in the basement and let them sit. Summer went on and got even more busy and I finally got around to checking them yesterday over lunchtime to see if they were done (I assumed they were but I was putting them in lower temp and used lager yeast for the first time with the steam beer batch so I didn't know...).
I posted yesterday about having trouble with them not fermenting out but was informed extremely quickly about what I had done wrong with trying to check the SG with a refractometer (thanks Yooper!). I've been brewing for over 3.5 yrs and had never known that you couldn't use a refractometer when alcohol was there.
So, this morning, I got up before the kids to keg (assuming my beer was finished) and kegged one batch... Here's where my assumed containers with properly labeled yeasts gets a little more questionable. I made ten gallons of each style but used two yeast strains for each. So four different yeast. With my Wee heavy, I meant to use White Labs Edinburgh strain and Dry US-05 strain. The Steam beer was gonna use White Labs San Fransisco liquid lager strain and dry S-23 lager strain. But I'm pretty sure I mixed those up...
I'm thinking the US-05 and S-23 got switched... But I'm even more confused because the containers labeled as the Wee Heavy are actually lighter in color than the steam beers
The picture shows the steam beer labeled beer on the left. The other odd thing was the ones I thought were the steam beers FG was higher than the steam (although only slightly).
So, this rant was basically just so say I'm an idiot.:rockin:
Have a great weekend!
My life is pretty busy... I know everyone's is but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I beat the majority of the population in absolute productivity/efficiency of my time. That said, I know there's always room for improvement (but that's a whole other thread...) and hanging out on a forum may slow down said efficiency but its Saturday and I want to share this
. So my last brew day was July 3rd. My brewing time has come to a crawl. So I decided that to help be more efficient, I would brew 2 ten gallon batches to make up for my lack of time. Unfortunately, my brother, who I usually brew with, was planning on going camping with his family over the 4th of July weekend. I've only brewed one other time by myself and - while doable- is so much easier to do and keep on track and take good notes with two people. So, to recap; I'm brewing by myself and doing 2 totally different (and brand new) AG recipes in one setting, by myself... A steam beer and a Wee Heavy.
Overall, everything went well, and I hit most of my numbers (I used an old bag of brown malt that I figured wouldn't fully mash but I knew that going in) but by the time I got done, I was going on 10.5 hrs so I was getting fairly loopy. - Not drunk, just ready for the damn day to be done. I finally put the four containers in the basement and let them sit. Summer went on and got even more busy and I finally got around to checking them yesterday over lunchtime to see if they were done (I assumed they were but I was putting them in lower temp and used lager yeast for the first time with the steam beer batch so I didn't know...).
I posted yesterday about having trouble with them not fermenting out but was informed extremely quickly about what I had done wrong with trying to check the SG with a refractometer (thanks Yooper!
). I've been brewing for over 3.5 yrs and had never known that you couldn't use a refractometer when alcohol was there.So, this morning, I got up before the kids to keg (assuming my beer was finished) and kegged one batch... Here's where my assumed containers with properly labeled yeasts gets a little more questionable. I made ten gallons of each style but used two yeast strains for each. So four different yeast. With my Wee heavy, I meant to use White Labs Edinburgh strain and Dry US-05 strain. The Steam beer was gonna use White Labs San Fransisco liquid lager strain and dry S-23 lager strain. But I'm pretty sure I mixed those up...
I'm thinking the US-05 and S-23 got switched... But I'm even more confused because the containers labeled as the Wee Heavy are actually lighter in color than the steam beers
The picture shows the steam beer labeled beer on the left. The other odd thing was the ones I thought were the steam beers FG was higher than the steam (although only slightly). So, this rant was basically just so say I'm an idiot.:rockin:
Have a great weekend!
But,
