12 Beers of Christmas 2012!

[biochemedic]

By the way, what are we shooting for as a ship date?

Probably between Thanksgiving and the first week of December...

 

[Draygon]

This has been asked before, but for anyone that did it last year can you let those of us knew to this know how you shipped it? UPS/FedEx obviously but did you buy the boxes from them too and if not where did you get yours. Im trying to plan this all out so that I can start piecing things together and can just go drop them off on a day to ship with no issues. Speaking of which, Bio I think we need to get an email or something going so everyone can get each others addresses needed for this.

 

[sfrisby]

This has been asked before, but for anyone that did it last year can you let those of us knew to this know how you shipped it? UPS/FedEx obviously but did you buy the boxes from them too and if not where did you get yours. Im trying to plan this all out so that I can start piecing things together and can just go drop them off on a day to ship with no issues. Speaking of which, Bio I think we need to get an email or something going so everyone can get each others addresses needed for this.

I've always gone through USPS. I also have a closet full of boxes and shipping material that I will reuse, which I know doesnt help to answer your question.

 

[Draygon]

USPS is the only one that it is illegal to ship alcohol through though...so i prob wont risk it.

 

[biochemedic]

Like sfrisby, I keep a collection of smallish boxes throughout the year that I use for shipping. I purchased a large roll of small-bubble bubble wrap from WalMart (it was like 10 or 15 bucks). I use 2 sheets per bottle then double ziploc bag them. I bought the gallon ziplocs at Sam's. (I have enough left of both packing supplies to ship this year too. Finally, I pack the rest of the space on the box with shredded paper...free, essentially, if you own a shredder, and have two kids who love to shred your junk mail for you..
Last year I had to buy 3 boxes, but this year I'm pretty sure I'll be good with recycled ones...

If everyone can PM me their preferred mailing address, I will create a master list and PM it back out to the group when it's time. Remember, if you do have the ability to receive packages at a business address, it will be less expensive to ship there.

 

[Draygon]

What size boxes work best? I was already going to wrap in bubble wrap, the ziplock bags is a good idea that ill do as well. Just need to figure out what box to use.

 

[biochemedic]

What size boxes work best? I was already going to wrap in bubble wrap, the ziplock bags is a good idea that ill do as well. Just need to figure out what box to use.

I can get you some measurements...give me a few days and I can measure some of the boxes I have...

I'm on my mobile now so its tough to post links but there a more than a few threads (and a sticky, as I recall) on shipping homebrew...I may also just take some photos of my own process and post them here eventually ...

 

[Draygon]

That'd help a lot Bio, thx.

 

[Clanchief]

Update on Saffron Tripel--racked the main batch (wlp530) to condition in a corny with 1oz of bitter orange peel and the saffron threads. The batch w/3711 tasted quite citrusy as is so I bottled that today for long-term bottle conditioning. As for my Brett experiment, I racked the BGS off it's Sacc yeast and pitched Brett Brux.

At this point, my plan is to let each recipient choose his poison: 3 bottles of the main batch, 2 of the main + 1 of the 3711 batch, or 1 each of the main, 3711, and Brett BGS. Cool?

I'll take 1 of each.

 

[Clanchief]

I've had a tough time finding the time to brew the last several weeks, and I had been planning on having my Crabapple Lambicky Ale in primary by now. Sadly, I'm a little behind schedule. FEAR NOT! I'm brewing it up on Tuesday night with a buddy coming over to help. Here's the recipe that I'm going to be using, just in case anyone is interested:

9# 4.1 oz. 2 row
2# 8 oz. White wheat malt
1# Caracrystal wheat
1# 2.2 oz. Vienna
4 oz. clear candi sugar

Mash at 148 for 75 minutes

Hops
1.3 oz. Saaz @ 60
1.3 oz. Saaz @ 30

Yeast - Wyeast 1214 - 1L starter
Primary at 68-72 for ~3 weeks

Transfer to secondary
Add 4 lbs. fresh frozen cranberries
1 package of Wyeast 3112 Brett Brux
6 weeks in secondary then bottle

This should give it enough time in the bottle to relax while still getting a full fermentation and development of the flavors. If anyone has any suggestions let me know. Definitely excited to brew this one!

 

[biochemedic]

This is how I pack a 12 oz longneck. It may be overkill, but I'm fully confident that barring *major* trauma to the box, this will prevent any breakage, and probably would prevent leakage even if a bottle broke or bottle bomb occurred:

Materials: 1 bottle of beer (duh), 2 sheets bubble wrap, 2 one gallon ziplocs, scotch tape.

Step 1 - I use two sheets (12 inch square) of small bubble wrap. As mentioned previously this can be purchased at Wally World in a large roll very cheaply. I do roll them from one corner (it facilitates folding the ends later).

Step 2 - Roll up second sheet. I generally have the 'bubble side' of the sheets facing each other, and the flat sides to the bottle and facing outward. This seems to help with slippage, and facilitates taping. I do put a small piece of tape at the corner end of each wrap.

Step 3 - Fold and flatten, then tape down the cap end...

Step 4 - ...and then the bottom end. You will see that wrapping the sheets from the corner allows a nice 'tail' to fold over and fully protect the ends.

Step 5 - Put the wrapped bottle in a gallon size ziploc.

Step 6 - Roll the bottle up in the first bag; as you seal up the ziploc, squeeze out *most but not all* of the air. This allows a little additional cushion.

Step 7 - Repeat with the second bag. Here's the finished bottle, ready to pack in a box...

 

[Draygon]

Thx for that, ill pick up all that stuff, last bit i need to know is the size of the box to hold 3 fully wrapped bottles and the cheapest place to get them.

 

[Clanchief]

I'm not sure what size boxes people are planning to use, but for 3 beers, I was thinking of something around a 12 x 12 x 12 box. I'll probably use similar wrapping to what Biochemedic posted, but I have a whole crap ton of packing peanuts left over from a shipment sent to me from Austin Homebrew. I figure I might as well give them a little extra buffer. 12x12x12 should fit three bottles with packing material fairly well, based on my college memories of working in a Mail Boxes Etc.

 

[biochemedic]

I still plan on measuring a few of the boxes that were used last year, and I'll post that info up when I can get that done (got too tired last night after mucking around trying to re-size and upload the pictures of the packing procedure). You can use a variety of box sizes, but from my recall, 12x12x12 is pretty close to a good size. I remember thinking that the "optimum" size (ie, able to comfortably fit the three wrapped bottles, without having excessive space to fill with additional material) was a little smaller than that. When I pack I also do put in shredded paper (from shredding old bills/receipts/junk mail), which works just as well as peanuts or crumpled paper/newspaper. There's definitely a variety of ways to do things.

 

[Clanchief]

Yeah, shredded paper works very well. I'm using packing peanuts myself because I happen to have a metric ton of them sitting around. At least, that's what SWMBO says. It's a good way for me to us them up.

 

[biochemedic]

Ok, here goes...as I recalled, 12x12x12 is bigger than actually needed, the box size needed is deceptively small. Certainly, if you could get 12x12x12 cheaply, you'll just need some additional packing material to fill in the extra space.

10.5 inches seems to be about a minimum for the long axis of the bottle, so one box dimension needs to be at least that length.

I've formatted the listed sizes below as follows:
'Length of box oriented to the long axis of the bottle' x width x height'

Box 1 -- 12 x 7.5 x 5.5

Box 2 -- 12 x 9.5 x 4.5

Box 3 -- 11.5 x 8.75 x 6. As you can see this one is a Priority Mail Flat Rate box...

Box 4 -- 10.5 x 7.25 x 5.5. This box has a real nice tight fit and will need a minimum of extra packing material.

Box 5 -- 10.5 x 12 x 4.5

 

[biochemedic]

The Caramel Quad is bottled! (Now comes the long wait for December...)

 

[jtakacs]

sweet... i'm brewing the abbey weizen in a month - only 1.062 OG so it shouldn't need much... thinking 30 days bottle conditioning, 30ish days fermenting... i might do a test batch with homegrown hops first in a few weeks - i have some that'll be ready.

looking forward to it bio... sounds yummy!

 

[Clanchief]

I'm brewing the Crabapple Lambicky Ale tonight. I'll post up here with how things go!

 

[dgez]

I racked the juniper rye bock to 2ndary today. It tastes great! It has a very woody flavor to it, like a freshly cut pine tree..or like a freshly cut 2X4. Its not as in your face as I thought it would be considering 8oz of crushed juniper berries were used. The gravity reading is 1.017...I was hoping to get it down to 14 or 15. I'm still going to let it sit at fermentation temp for another month because I'm going to be brewing another lager in the coming days. So once that lager is done I'll kick the temps down for a 10 week slumber at 37. I'll probably take a final gravity reading a month from now.

 

[SavoryChef]

Just added the dried fruit to the Fruitcake Old Ale a couple days ago. It started to bubble in the airlock again.

 

[Draygon]

I popped a bottle of the Spiced Bourbon Imperial Stout tonight to see how its coming along. It still has a fairly strong star anise taste to it...some if the other spices are there, not too strong though. It doesnt have much carbonation to it, and probably wont given the 13.5% ABV of it. Its very smooth, and will cellar extremely well IMO. Overall I think its coming along very nicely!

 

[biochemedic]

I popped a bottle of the Spiced Bourbon Imperial Stout tonight to see how its coming along. It still has a fairly strong star anise taste to it...some if the other spices are there, not too strong though. It doesnt have much carbonation to it, and probably wont given the 13.5% ABV of it. Its very smooth, and will cellar extremely well IMO. Overall I think its coming along very nicely!

How long has it been bottled? I wouldn't worry about the carbonation at this point....higher grav brews can take months to carbonate/bottle condition. I'm not expecting any carb on the Caramel Quad (10.5 %)'til at least October... and I added fresh yeast at bottling, long with a relatively high vol CO2 amount of priming sugar...

 

[Shuznuts]

Just bottled the Christmas gruit. Came out just over %10 abv. The hydrometer sample had hints of cinnamon, juniper, with a nice hop bitterness in the background. Not bad for a green beer.



My 2 l yeast starter





The mash at 150 for 60 minutes





The spices measured out





Ginger beer I drank while brewing this one.

Anyway, hope y'all like it.

 

[SavoryChef]

Fruitcake old ale update:
Just racked it off the fruit. The fruit had no flavor when I tasted it so its all in the beer. The beer taste kinda fruit sour with cinnamon and clove. I can definitely see why this needs to age.
Fg was 1.020 when I added the fruit, it started bubbling again and the gravity was 1.019 when I racked it off the fruit. So not sure how much more abv there will be, maybe 1-2%?

 

[biochemedic]

Dropping a point is probably only a fraction of a percent, but who really cares...by Christmas it will be awesome! I do recall the fruitcake old ale recipe having some tartness, so it sounds like you're dead on....

I'm itching to crack open one of the caramel quads but I'm restraining myself until it's been bottle conditioning for at least a month and a half or so... (It's only been ~3 wks at this point)

 

[SavoryChef]

What about the sugar in the fruit that fermented out? It had to create a little more abv.

 

[sfrisby]

What about the sugar in the fruit that fermented out? It had to create a little more abv.

Remind us of the fruit you added, please?

 

[SavoryChef]

.75# each dried raisins, blueberries, apricots and cherries. I went to the gotmead website and inputted the amounts into their calculator and came up with 2%. But without a full mead recipe who knows.

 

[Draygon]

Tasted another one of my Spiced Bourbon Imperial Stouts, still very little carbonation (which may stay this way) the Star Anise is still very prominent in it, hoping that still goes down and mellows a bit more in the next few months.

Have we set a ship date for this yet?