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What I did for beer today

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Kegged my Simcoe/Centennial/Citra IPA using an orange carboy cap and racking cane, and I used CO2 to push the beer out. I had used that technique before, but this time I left the CO2 on even after the siphon got started just so that the headspace would be filled with CO2 instead of room air as the fermenter drained. Seemed to work really well. Now I'm kinda glad my Autosiphon broke.
 
I ordered two beer kits from More Beer! yesterday & the ESB got here first thing this morning. Red ale is still in transit,but here's the ESB;
 
Bottled my Belgian Quad.
Just mashed out on an experimental Rye+Wheat beer with HBC342 hops.
Checked my scores from a local BJCP comp where I got a pedestrian 30. Considering it was my first competition and I entered a low ABV Belgian IPA as an American Pale Ale, I wasn't too surprised and am actually pretty happy with the judges feedback.
Now drinking some more homebrews. :tank:
 
Bottled my Meyer Lemon Mead (not beer, I know.)

But I'm about to brew 5 more gallons of my summer saison

SAM_2704.jpg
 
Kegged my Simcoe/Centennial/Citra IPA using an orange carboy cap and racking cane, and I used CO2 to push the beer out. I had used that technique before, but this time I left the CO2 on even after the siphon got started just so that the headspace would be filled with CO2 instead of room air as the fermenter drained. Seemed to work really well. Now I'm kinda glad my Autosiphon broke.

You and I have very good regulators on our tanks. I have been doing the same, setting the regulator at 1 pound. I'm so glad to hear of others doing the same trick. When I mentioned the technique several trolls said I was going to kill myself by exploding carboy. Good work. Cheers
 
Pulled the dry hop out of my IPA after a week. Smelled freaking amazing (simcoe, Columbus, & cascade). Sadly I won't be able to bottle it until next weekend. :(
 
Bottled my amber that's been in primary for 4 or 5 weeks, don't remember how long. It's been cold crashing for over a week and was crystal clear going into the bottling bucket. Got 51 bottled beers. The sample I tasted was better than my FG sample a couple weeks ago, hoping it improves w carbonation and conditioning because it was quite underwhelming.
 
It's not all that bad - my regular grain is super cheap, and since I don't have a ton of space, sticking with dry yeast works out pretty well.

I was intrigued by the color of the Vienna SMaSH wort, it came out darker than I had expected. I also ended up with a ton of cold break, making me wish I had used kettle finings. I stopped using whirlfloc a couple batches ago when I had thick kettle trub almost to the one-gallon mark in a brew and ended up going to primary a few liters short of my goal, but this time around, an extra liter or two in the boil and whirlfloc or irish moss would have been helpful.

My two replacement hydrometers arrived this morning, packed so tightly and in such convolutions of padding that I managed to break the first one before I even got the packing tape off the tube it was shipped in. I was able to salvage the mission by gingerly cutting the tape from the second tube so I didn't kill both hydros before I had even gotten them out of their packaging.

Efficiency with the Vienna malt was 83%, according to Beersmith - that's four kilos of malt, 4.5 gallons into the fermenters/lost to trub, OG 14.5 Plato/1.059. Not bad. Of course, in the endless march toward better process, I did something different with my mash-in this time, so I don't know how much of the difference was the process change, how much was the pro malt, and how much was due to other variables.
 
Just getting going on bottling up my Guajilla Ancho Amber Ale. I'm not quite sure how many bottles to sanitize, because I overshot my volume by a ton on this batch. It was supposed to be 5.25 gallons and I ended up with at least an extra gallon. Still hit the gravity, though.

Anyway, it tasted a little too sweet when I took a gravity reading last week. Hopefully, the dry hop and the second dose of peppers balance out that sweetness a bit.
 
Just brewed an amber ale in my recently built Ebiab system with pump. Man does this make the brewday a snap. Simple to set up, simple to run, simple to clean. And I got 77% efficiency!
 
Dumped a failed Moo-Hoo clone. It was stuck at 1.030 after over a month, way too bitter, and didnt have any hint of chocolate.

On a positive note, I took a brett B starter off the stir plate so I can decant and step up for a brewday soon :D
 
I cleaned two kegs, have 2 more soaking, & filled one of the clean ones with star san only to find out the out leaked. Cleaned the poppits, replaced all o-rings (a first for me being new to kegging) and filled it with root beer. Temporarily, my desk is 5' from my keg. I will be full of root beer in no time at all! Very very excited, overly so.

Dumped a failed Moo-Hoo clone. It was stuck at 1.030 after over a month, way too bitter, and didnt have any hint of chocolate.

On a positive note, I took a brett B starter off the stir plate so I can decant and step up for a brewday soon :D

Really? What yeast did you use?
 
I made a 1 gallon batch of NB's Bourbon Barrel porter, except I didn't read the instructions until I took my hydro sample. Came with two 1 lb bags of DME, and I was supposed to only use 1.5 lbs. Ooops. OG was 1.092.


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew
 
Added 2 oz of Galaxy dry hops to a batch of hoppy wheat. And I racked a batch of saison using wlp670 to secondary with 3 oz of oak cubes.
 
Picked up three, two gallon buckets from Home Depot to ferment small batches in! Hooray!
 
Really? What yeast did you use?

1098. I think it was the chocolate in the wort that caused that, but I honestly have no idea. Either way, I didnt want to waste any more time on 1 gallon. I will probably do a re-do mid summer, maybe sooner.
 
I got the spigot installed on my new fermenter the other day. My 2nd box from more beer was shipped late yesterday. Snow today,but still gotta get to the lhbs for a new floating thermometer. Used it since the beginning & broke the top off in my mash last time. Good thing I had that fine mesh strainer. Will have Irish red & an ESB coming soon,both E/SG kits. Pipeline fillers fer sher.
 
Had a facepalm.

I kegged an IPA and put it on gas over the weekend. I have a dual body regulator and have the IPA on one side and a cider on the other. I had used the gas from the cider side to push the IPA out of the fermenter into the keg.

Sunday I went to have a glass of cider and there was barely any flow. Oh crap, I thought, the gauge is really low and I must be out of gas! There's not enough to carb the IPA! And I have no time to get to the LHBS for more gas until Weds or Thurs! The IPA will not be ready for tastes this weekend!! Oh no!

Then I realized this morning that I forgot to open the valve going into the cider. There's plenty of gas left. Dope.
 
Brewed a Blue Moon clone for the wife, although my half got Wyeast 3944. I still can't believe what an upgrade my Duda diesel 30 plate chiller is over my shirron. And then the quick connects I got from Bobby M were also awesome, can't believe I waited so long to get those. Even with gravity feed restricting flow on the outside using a ball valve worked wonders and I was down to low 60s in under 5 minutes. I also bottled 5 gallons of my brown ale recipe.
 
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