And the problem is, that most of the time I only have maybe 6 or so bottles left when we realize that, holy crap, this beer is damn good!
Brew more.
The first three batches I made were good, but I wound up drinking them before they had fully matured and ran into the same situation where the last few bottles were excellent. My father is a huge beer fan and so are a few buddies; all will have a session EVERY NIGHT. So I ran into a problem with keeping a quantity around of good brew.
So I decided that I needed to change something up. I brewed up four 5 gallon batches in four days, IPA, american wheat, a dubbel, and a wit. I bought an extra glass carboy and went cheapo with two plastic food grade buckets from sysco. After they had fermented to a stable target FG, I bottled them and put them away for about a month. With 20 gallons in reserve stores, I had enough to last me for a little while. I kept brewing once every two weks, trying to keep production levels up. I bought over 100 bombers for bottling before I broke down and bought a corny keg system.
For me, it was a matter of producing enough, setting it aside, and keeping up a brewing schedule. Plastic buckets are super cheap, blow-off tube assembly is super cheap, so if my fermentation vessels are tied-up, just a trip down to home creepo and sysco and less than $10 later, I am ready to brew.
I have decent fermentation temperatures in my basement, about 68F, even when it is over 90F here in CO. When I brew a Belgian ale, I just throw the fermentation chamber out in the garage and let the high fermentation temps do their work. I dont worry about off-flavors and so far, it has worked out great. I use starters, throwing the yeast in a Nalgene bottle with some DME two days before brewing. I quickly throw the Nalgene bottle in StarSan. I have made 23 batches of beer since I started.
Other flaws I would like to fix in my process are poor vorlauf and not straining wort going into fermenter, and also long cold crashing periods (still don't have a chiller). But I wondered, where should these priorities be ranked??
Straining the wort before going into the fermentation vessel is not a major priority in my opinion, but this is qualified in that you should strain to a certain degree. On my first few batches, I screwed around with some stupidly small sieves (strainers) in order to attempt a clear beer. What a dummy. And I used to be a chemist! I did not think about the fermentation chemistry and biology cycle of the yeast. So I dumped the lab sieves and bought a everyday kitchen strainer dedicated to filtering out particles that were larger than 1/16".
As for bringing the wort down to pitching temps, I used to be really anal about this, worrying about it, which was useless. Now I make ice blocks in my chest freezer the night before, using plastic containers from walmart. I found some organizer bins, about 1' x 8" x 5", make up 8 of em. I just take my wort in the SS pot and throw it in my SS sink in an ice bath with the broken blocks. I put the lid on the wort pot, throw a sanitized towel over it, so capillary action pulls water up, and turn on a box fan to push air over it. Works great.
