No question, just wanted to share!
That's right, I went a whole year without brewing. Lots of things got in the way, including buying a house and moving in. But my new house is a mother/daughter setup, and I figured I'd use the second, smaller kitchen to brew indoors! So I ran to the LHBS and picked up ingredients Sunday afternoon, and got to brewing.
... And I scorched the countertop pretty good. If I do this again, I'll need to either make some kind of a heat shield or just use my propane burner.
Other than that, it went well. Brewed a Weizenbock using a recipe from my LHBS. All extract, WLP300 yeast. Plugged the recipe into Brewer's Friend and my measured OG is only off by 0.001 from their prediction, but a little low for a Weizenbock - looks like it'll end up about 5.0% ABV. I also ended up with almost exactly 5 gallons into the fermenter. Not sure how I boiled off 1.5 gallons of water, but there you have it. I should have topped it off a bit, but didn't think of it at the time. We'll see how much volume ends up in bottles.
I'm glad to have something in the pipeline again, but what I'm really excited about is this time I have fermentation temperature control! Wired up an STC-1000 to a spare fridge (just cooling, no heat). Pitched the yeast at about 70F and kept it there until I had signs of fermentation kicking in, then lowered it to 64F for 24 hours just to be sure it didn't get too hot. Then kicked it back up to 68F and I'm leaving it there for 10 days before checking the gravity again.
And in the last year I've met two homebrewer friends, one of whom wants to have a brew day with me. We'll be doing an almond porter on the first or second weekend of November. If it's the second weekend, this Weizenbock might just be ready to drink.
That's right, I went a whole year without brewing. Lots of things got in the way, including buying a house and moving in. But my new house is a mother/daughter setup, and I figured I'd use the second, smaller kitchen to brew indoors! So I ran to the LHBS and picked up ingredients Sunday afternoon, and got to brewing.
... And I scorched the countertop pretty good. If I do this again, I'll need to either make some kind of a heat shield or just use my propane burner.
Other than that, it went well. Brewed a Weizenbock using a recipe from my LHBS. All extract, WLP300 yeast. Plugged the recipe into Brewer's Friend and my measured OG is only off by 0.001 from their prediction, but a little low for a Weizenbock - looks like it'll end up about 5.0% ABV. I also ended up with almost exactly 5 gallons into the fermenter. Not sure how I boiled off 1.5 gallons of water, but there you have it. I should have topped it off a bit, but didn't think of it at the time. We'll see how much volume ends up in bottles.
I'm glad to have something in the pipeline again, but what I'm really excited about is this time I have fermentation temperature control! Wired up an STC-1000 to a spare fridge (just cooling, no heat). Pitched the yeast at about 70F and kept it there until I had signs of fermentation kicking in, then lowered it to 64F for 24 hours just to be sure it didn't get too hot. Then kicked it back up to 68F and I'm leaving it there for 10 days before checking the gravity again.
And in the last year I've met two homebrewer friends, one of whom wants to have a brew day with me. We'll be doing an almond porter on the first or second weekend of November. If it's the second weekend, this Weizenbock might just be ready to drink.
