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What I did for beer today

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Kegged my English mild today! Smells and tastes wonderful flat and young. I can't wait to taste it when it's carbed. Also changed out all my o-rings on both kegs posts, interior post o-ring, poppet o-ring, exterior o-ring. I also changed out the o-rings and put new tubing on the Clear Beer floating dip tubes. I bought some 1/4 inch silicone online and have been changing them all out (I have 10 of them). Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend everyone!

John
 
Brewed up a Guinness clone today after brewing Chevallier based bitters yesterday. Yeast are going to town on yesterday’s brew. A great weekend!
 

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Today is all about cleaning the brewery; yes I got the garage done the other day, but today so far I've disassembled and cleaned the ball valve and bent diptube on the BK (way overdue to do that, it was nasty), and water is currently heating to boil out the plate chiller. Leftover water will be used to mop the slightly nasty floor. Husband just came out to take the trash cans to the street (I already did it) so now he has no excuse to start his own chores. Have a bet with myself it won't get done today either. I am in the ZONE this weekend, a place I rarely visit.
 
Bottled my Lion Stout clone. I say "clone" in the loosest sense of the term. The original is over 8%, and mine ended up around 5.5. Overshot volume and undershot OG on brew day. I was aiming for 6.5 - 7%.

Maybe I'll call it "Lion Cub Stout."

But damn, that hydro sample tasted good. No idea if it will end up comparable in flavor, as I haven't seen Lion Stout in stores here for about 10 years.

Tomorrow, I plan to brew 12 gallons of IPA. Gotta use up some of the hops in my freezer. That'll get the summer pipeline filled for a while.
 
Brewing 5 gallons of " Dobby the house bitter" , was going to brew another lager , a pils version of my " I just cut a big one " lawn mowing beer .... But my son wanted some more Dobby so we are brewing our first batch of beer together .
Yesterday was my birthday ... both of my kids home from college . I'm a happy dad.😁
 
Because of cleaning and cooking all day Saturday and Sunday for the Sunday Q, Monday I finally got into the garage. Blended the last gallon of Flanders Red (too sour) with the Passionfruit-Guava Cider (oddly tasteless) into something beautiful. Adjusted the temp and CO2 on the kegerator, we'll see if we can get it balanced this week. Kegged the Motueka Pilsner, it is soooo lemony. FG came in lower than expected, probably from the double decoction and the brown rice. Tasted the $20 Moscato wine kit that I dumped 7oz. of whole-leaf Cascade into, and it's grapefruit, so much grapefruit. SWMBO is very happy, so I will be using this technique on some ciders and cheap-@$$ wine kits in the future!
 
Not much but hopefully today or tomorrow find time to check the gravity on my Blue Moon clone. All I've done for a couple of days is mull around in my head if I should pull the trigger on this Chinese made SS mash tun ??? Or some other shiny piece of brewing equipment I probably don't really need but need to convince the wife I couldn't do without to explain my, in her opinion, criminal use of my money ??? Anybody have this or heard about it ???
 

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Not much but hopefully today or tomorrow find time to check the gravity on my Blue Moon clone. All I've done for a couple of days is mull around in my head if I should pull the trigger on this Chinese made SS mash tun ??? Or some other shiny piece of brewing equipment I probably don't really need but need to convince the wife I couldn't do without to explain my, in her opinion, criminal use of my money ??? Anybody have this or heard about it ???
I think the cost is too high for only 32 qts and being made of plastic. I would just hold off until you can get a vacuum insulated ss mash tun. I caught my Chapman on sale for $160. It was half off on black Friday.
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Or some other shiny piece of brewing equipment
T Murph is on to something there Sean ... the Chapman is shinier 🤪 .
Ya'll don't even want to see my setup ... only shiny I've got is my kettle and it was a cheap one . I did find a killer deal the other day on a SS 40 qt. Bayou classic with valve and basket for 30 bucks shipped so I bought that .
I mash in a bag in an igloo cooler that I found in an old shed ... that's it kettle, igloo , carboy , bottlecapper .:bigmug:
 
I think the cost is too high for only 32 qts and being made of plastic. I would just hold off until you can get a vacuum insulated ss mash tun. I caught my Chapman on sale for $160. It was half off on black Friday.
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Wow that is a beautiful piece of equipment! I have two 8 gal Chapman fermenters. The One Brew is SS on inside. But thanks for the info ! No telling in today's economic downturn if the price will ever happen again, you were lucky ! I could wait for another Black Friday cause I don't really need a SS mash tun just a desire 🤣😂. My 10 and 5 gal igloos I made myself work just fine ..but they are not shiny and purdy !!
 
T Murph is on to something there Sean ... the Chapman is shinier 🤪 .
Ya'll don't even want to see my setup ... only shiny I've got is my kettle and it was a cheap one . I did find a killer deal the other day on a SS 40 qt. Bayou classic with valve and basket for 30 bucks shipped so I bought that .
I mash in a bag in an igloo cooler that I found in an old shed ... that's it kettle, igloo , carboy , bottlecapper .:bigmug:
Yeah ! Shiny and pretty just does something to you doesn't it ?!!! SS brewing equipment is my yellow brick road to Brewing Nirvana 😂🤣. Like when you get your first SS fermenter, you've gone from your 10 year old sedan to your first AWD SUV. Just warmness and fuzziness ! For my 1st 15 years of brewing everything was plastic now it's all SS for 8 years. Except for the mash tuns. It's a deep and dangerous rabbit hole for those of us not on the screw you I'm rich I can buy whatever I want list. So I've gotten my gear a piece here, a piece there over the years.
 
@tmurph you gotta stop posting pictures of all that beautiful shiny stuff ! I start salivating! It almost sends me into a SS equipment frenzy ! It's like a made in Heaven brewing candy store ! 😂😂
I'm not rich by no means but with over 30 yrs homebrewing and some good old southern ingenuity and salvaging and scraping my set up has come a long way. That and Bidens stimulus checks stimulated me to buy brewing equipment.
 
i checked my keg lines and tightened the regulator as it was loose. i also bought malt and hops cause i found 10 percent off for memorial day.

tonight after work i will sample my force carbed "hopefully american lager" which i named after i threw together what ever leftover ingredients i had to make a lager. and it has corn in it so hopefully it turns out to be an american lager.

i love beer
 
Filled two kegs with beer, cleaned four carboys, washed a kicked stout keg and replaced it in the keezer with a fresh stout keg. Noticed the pair of Eva-Dry E-500s desiccators in the keezer were saturated so swapped them for a dry pair and plugged the wet ones in to dry...

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Cheers!
 
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Brewed today, 12 gallons of IPA. 26 lbs of 2-row, and whatever leftovers I had to toss in (some munich, wheat, a bit of carafa). That 32lbs of grain + water made for a fun BIAB to hoist out. :mad:

Bittered with 8 oz Centennial, and 4 oz Artic (Citra clone) at 10 mins for flavor.

Was aiming for OG of 1.068 and 12 gallons, got 1.070 and 12 gal, so happy. Chilled and racked 6 gallons each into 2 Brew Buckets. Pitched 2 packets US-05 into each. Sitting at 63 in the ferm chamber. Blowoff tubes in place.

I plan to dry hop with Artic/Centennial/Triple Perle the last 4 or 5 days before bottling.
 
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The old beer fridge/kegerator/fermentation chamber died two weeks ago while away for work. I’ve been wanting to replace the fridge in our kitchen so I got the approval from the wife to order a new fridge over the Memorial Day weekend. It arrived today so I moved the beer and glasses into the old/new beer fridge tonight.
Now I need to move all the kegerator equipment over and pull out the additional hardware from the old fridge.
 
Cleaned, sanitized, and purged the keg that will receive the latest pressure-fermented lager later this afternoon. Yesterday moved the brewstand out (it's a heavy mother, about 200lbs of angle iron on wheels) to clean out behind it and scrub the floor. I spot mop after a brewday, but there were some sticky spots that needed the deck brush. Will be nice next brewday when my flipflops don't stick to the floor. Right now trying to decide what to brew this weekend; will either be another cream ale (current favorite recipe) or maybe something with a lot of Munich. New fermzilla is currently empty, and begging to be filled with something yummy.
 
Yeast is amazing. Today for beer, I bottled 10 gallons of an all mosaic brut IPA. I mashed and boiled a single batch but experimented with fermentation. The top picture was fermented with WLP001. The bottom picture was fermented with US-05. Both had similar FG but visually they look way different and taste way different also. The US-05 had a slight sulfur taste which I had not detected before as this has been my go to yeast for this recipe. We will see what both taste like in a few weeks after it has carbonated in bottles.
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Took a ride to our not-so-local lhbs to pick up a few items for the Ballantine IPA clone recipe I'm working on, then returned home to get a big 1056 starter going from a smack pack born just over a week ago on May 23 2023. Gotta be the darkest starter I've ever started, don't know what to make of it, we'll see what happens...

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Cheers!
 
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