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What I did for beer today

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Began souring a wort for a Pastry Sour. Happy Bacteria:

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Heading to the Fair today to pick up ribbons, buy scones, look at animals, eat junk food, and just have some fun. Results were posted, of four entries I got one First and three Seconds, including my very first sweet mead entry. The First is my American Strong that's been aging on bourbon-soaked oak cubes for four months, sipping on some right now and it keeps getting better.
 
The full fury (all 85hp and a worryingly dense cloud of blue smoke) of my hooptie brewery was unleashed today!

I brewed my first IPA of the season. Now that I've gained confidence in my Hopstopper, I decided to dime it and unleash some proper abuse in the form of 16oz of Cascades, Amarillo, Citra, and a bit of Warrior.

Somewhere in that gory mess of cold break and hops there lives a Hopstopper....

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There it is!
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Here’s the product it was producing
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With 6.5 gallons of clean wort into the fermenter, that means I should get enough product into my new 6gallon dry hopping keg to do the impossible: I intend to squirt dry hopped beer out of the PRV on my 5 gal serving keg.

I'll concede that this isn't a good thing to do. Nevertheless, an indisputably full, no more room for anything else, full keg of heavily dry hopped beer has been a white whale that I have chased for decades.

At last, it is within my grasp.

I also kegged another batch of that N. American adjunct lager that I've wasted the prior 2.5 years learning.

With an open lager keg and a happy blob of Diamond Lager Yeast ready to go, I have a decision to make for tomorrow. I could make a Vienna, a German pils, any number of respectable beers, but I'll likely (like a dog returning to its sick) make another adjunct lager.

It'll be amber colored this time, so that makes it respectable....right?

Right?
 
I spent a few hours sorting and sniffing the honeycrisp brandy collection jars from two weekends back. Conservative cuts left me with 13 pints of really good flavored hearts which I blended and proofed down to two gallons @60%. Half is aging white, the rest is on a mix of medium toasted French oak and untoasted American oak. Two jars in particular were really amazing with a baked apple aroma, pulled those from the flock to age separately with a cinnamon stick each. The remaining heads went into a first run apple butter brandy, a gallon of tails @48% is in a jug waiting to be run again.

Blending and proofing so much product all at once really tested my patience and pouring skills, I'll need to source a ~3.5-4.0 gal stainless pot with a spigot for the next time.
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I spent a few hours sorting and sniffing the honeycrisp brandy collection jars from two weekends back. Conservative cuts left me with 13 pints of really good flavored hearts which I blended and proofed down to two gallons @60%. Half is aging white, the rest is on a mix of medium toasted French oak and untoasted American oak. Two jars in particular were really amazing with a baked apple aroma, pulled those from the flock to age separately with a cinnamon stick each. The remaining heads went into a first run apple butter brandy, a gallon of tails @48% is in a jug waiting to be run again.

Blending and proofing so much product all at once really tested my patience and pouring skills, I'll need to source a ~3.5-4.0 gal stainless pot with a spigot for the next time.View attachment 780011View attachment 780012View attachment 780013
I just purchased a 7.5 gallon/30 quart stainless kettle for $40 at kegconnection.com. They'll drill it for a bulkhead fitting too
 
Brewed up a Lutra Blonde this morning, tapped the Red from last weekend (yum), took delivery of new scale (110lb limit wow), & BBQ injector from Amazon, only to find I had no gelatin to test the injector with. Did get it set up where I can easily inject gelatin into a sealed keg, IF it works; attached the syringe part to a black keg disconnect with a length of tubing and hose clamps. Saw somewhere on here where a guy used JB Weld (!!!) which I wanted to stay away from. Mine is completely sanitizable and takeapartable. Figure all I need to do is release the pressure on a keg, then go to town. Might try it out with the pineapple hard seltzer I've had in the kegerator for a while; it's good, but quite tart. Thinking I could use the injector to backsweeten it with some agave. If nothing else I'll have a mess to clean up, I'm sure. *edit while typing - And it worked! After adding the sweetener (decided on stevia instead of agave, which tends to ball up in the bottom of the keg) I just gave it a blast of co2 through the out-post, and mixed it up very well.
 
Thanks! I think where I went wrong was using C-77 instead of black barley, and a little heavy on the chocolate. Also mine could use more hops. Always room for improvement!
 
Saw somewhere on here where a guy used JB Weld (!!!) which I wanted to stay away from.
Do not fear the JB Weld. It is a high quality, high temperature, strong structural epoxy. You can sanitize it just fine. Its’ bond to metal is superior, none finer IMHO. 500F working temperature…You can boil it if you wish…. 3960 lb tensile strength…. You will dig it..!
 
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Filtering, cold crashing and gelatine fining my British Strong later.
Might also "feed" some more candi sugar to my Bretted Belgian pale.
Managed half of this. Strong in the keg and cold crashing as we speak. Ran it through my 178 micron Bounce which took most of the solid matter out. Still a bit hazy but the gelatine will probably take care of that without issues once it gets down to temp.

Out of Candi so that's on the order list.
 
Do not fear the JB Weld. It is a high quality, high temperature, strong structural epoxy. You can sanitize it just fine. Its’ bond to metal is superior, none finer IMHO. 500F working temperature…You can boil it if you wish…. 3960 lb tensile strength…. You will dig it..!
thanks. I've used it before in non-food applications and you're right, there's nothing better. Just a little squalmish about using it in beer. Below is what I cobbled together; I don't have the disconnect screwed on super tight, so I can take it apart quickly to clean it. Probably going to shorten the tubing a bit.

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