It was a big brew weekend at my house. Saturday was for projects:
- Bought a clean homer bucket and parts to finally mount my old Corona mill permanently on a bucket.
- Bought 50' of 1/2" copper to upgrade my wort chiller and assembled. I'll use the smaller one (25' of 3/8 copper) as a pre-chiller.
- Hit up the brew store and picked up a couple bags of grain.
Sunday was even busier--I started at 10AM and went till midnight:
- Brewed my English IPA, with a two-hour mash schedule (I started it before church and finished up when we got back)
- Bottled my White House Honey Ale AG recipe--super tasty, I can't wait for this to be ready
- Tried a test bottle of the spiced Christmas ale I bottled last week. The flavor's rounding out, but somehow it's still way over-spiced, much more than what I remember from previous years. Going to have to review what I did wrong on that one.
- Bottled about six gallons of hard cider after backsweetening with fresh cider. Going to have to monitor these kind of closely and pasteurize when they hit proper carbonation. This stuff tastes amazing!
- Prior to bottling the WHHA and the cider, cleaned and sterilized 150+ bottles which had been knocking around the basement for several months. We're having a "bring a non-screw off six pack" holiday party at my house on Friday and it's a good thing--I've got two batches of beer and another six gallons of cider ready to bottle, and only a couple of dozen bottles left in my storage closet!