"I'm basically mildly drunk and this is strange"

I transferred my 3 gallon BIAB batch to the secondary fermenter today. It's looking good. I'll add the dry hops in a week or so.

I caved and bought an economy bottle tree. No more upside down in the box for me.
Bottled that 4 gallon carbon monoxide poisoning BIAB batch tonight. This time I just did a hot blast rinse and then a sanitize squirt and kept them on the bottle tree. Everyone has been telling me my cleaning is overkill so if this turns out it fine I'm sticking with it. Took me half the time it usually does. Hour and a half start to finish. That includes cleaning the carboy AND I still did about a dozen 12 oz bottles amongst the bombers and 750 ml. I just really like to have a variety of sizes.

Girls are asleep, I'm not tired, brewing the 1 gallon Tiny Terror barleywine and also bottling a scotch ale batch I brewed like a month ago. Finally. Shit took forever to settle out. 8.0% temp corrected abv at 1.022 FG. Tastes good, very caramel / smokey / normal.

Oh and I got ANOTHER 5L oak ageing barrel in the mail today from someone else. If this keeps up, I can age all 5 gallons from a batch at once. As it is, that's half a batch between the two.

Got it brewed last night, but the "evening brewing" experience leaves much to be desired. EVERYTHING takes sooooo much longer when you're tiptoeing around not clinking bottles or making any noise. Holy fuck it took from 10 to 3am just to brew that 1 gallon and bottle a normal batch. I am a zombie today.

6 pounds of Maris, 3 ounces of east kent goldings.


11pm. 4 short hours to go (:nono:)


Tiny tiny tiny finished product.


OG was 1.10, or temp-corrected potential alcohol of 13.4 or so. If I can get it down to where it should be, should wind up around 12% I guess. The mash on the stovetop was harder than usual somehow. Probably because of how distracted I was, and the low water volume. Took a lot of futzing to keep it near 158. Need that cooler setup, pronto. Saw your link, Cats, will order something somewhere when we get back into town post-christmas.

If you didn't have that ridiculous OG I would be nervous about all the head space in that carboy. But I think you'll have enough CO2 going to clear out the oxygen quickly. And then it's going into the barrel next right?

It's gonna be fucking awesome. I'm so thirsty thinking about it.

Yeah man I just need it to get most of the way to the finish line, so like a few weeks maybe 4, and then it goes into one of the barrels. Still have to figure out an airlock.

Also this morning (so 5 hours after pitching) it had begun to form a cute little kreuzen.

I bottled the NYE Amber Ale last night. Final gravity was 1.016, so I ended up with a 6.1% ABV.
The EKG hops stand out, but the malt finish is a bit off. I'll have to try it the night on the 30th before I actually decide if I want to share it with people. I'm hoping I can detect the actual imperfection in the finish by that time.
I ended up doing seven .750 ml bottles and twenty eight 12oz bottles. I'll probably bring four bombers and a six pack of 12oz bottles to the party.

I’m drinking some of the English Mild/Amber Ale I brewed for NYE tonight. The party never actually took place, so I have a fair amount of home brew stashed away in a closet right now. I’m not going to complain, since I have been enjoying a beer or two every night this week.
I spent part of my day off working on recipes for my next two projects while enjoying some coffee at a local coffee house. I thought a few people might come up and ask me about home brewing, since my table was covered by beer catalogs and the Oxford Companion to Beer, and they sort of looked at me inquisitively.
I plan on making an oak aged IPA next and to use all of my Northern Brewer gift card to pay for the ingredients.
I’m going to steep some Belgian Biscuit Malt with some Simpson Golden Promise malt before I add the extract, and I plan on using 9.15 pounds of Maris Otter Malt Syrup and three pounds of Briess Pilsen DME during the sixty minute boil.
I haven’t finalized the hop schedule yet, but I would like to use four ounces of four different hops during the boil and two different style of hops during the oak aging/dry hopping stage.
My hop list includes Amarillo, Centennial, Citra, Columbus, Falconer’s Flight, Glacier and Summit. A few of those are damn near impossible to get right now, so I’m more than willing to replace one or two with another high alpha citrus/melon flavored hop variety.
The other recipe I am/was working on is for my entry into an AHA club only extract beer contest in May. I want to make a Black Rye Ale that I am calling Melancholia or Black Bile Rye Ale.
I want to steep Chocolate Rye and Crystal Rye malts with Flaked Rye, and use six pounds of Dark Malt Syrup, 3.15 pounds of Rye Malt syrup and two pounds of Briess Dark DME in the boil.
My hop choices are more spicy, black currant flavored hop varietals like French Strisselspalt, Newport, German Magnum and Vanguard.
As for yeast, I plan on going with either White Labs California V or Wyeast NeoBritannia for the IPA and Wyeast Whitbread or Danstar American West Coast Ale for the Black Rye Ale.

I forget but if you told me but I am pretty safe in assuming those are 10 gallon batches...?

gah!
Promethium it's a bummer that party didn't happen. Sharing it and seeing reactions is probably the most rewarding part for me.

i have more type up and more pictures on
baking bread with reused yeast,
ginger beers,
bottle bombs,
fun bottling day
tasting notes from the first BIAB batch and the wife's pilsner
additional BIAB brewday,
baking bread with spent grains

i have too much work piling up.
so im just saying hi dudes.

hi dudes. BRB.

fuck sake dude you've been unacceptably scarce. Get the fuck back in here and edumacate me. I still don't have a mash tun cooler, and I NEED one.

Five gallon batches, but after racking to a secondary fermenter and a bottling bucket, it will probably be closer to 3.5 gallons.

I got to share more of it with my fellow home brewers at our annual holiday party, so it wasn't a total loss. I would prefer to get a brutal critique from a fellow homebrewer than I would a half hearted compliment from a person that doesn't really understand beer.
Thankfully, I have not received any really brutal critiques and I continue to brew decent beers that lack any discernible flaws. They simply aren't really big or experimental beers.

Fucking FINALLY. Got off my ass, went to Depot, brought that guy's parts list that Cats linked from a homebrew forum, got it all, biked it home. Thursday next week I brew all-grain at full batch size. STOKED. No more cheating with extract.

You'll still have to cheat with extracts to make some truly big beers.
I'm brewing the American IPA on Tuesday. I had to wait about two weeks to order supplies for various reasons, but now I've go them and I am looking forward to a day of brewing.

Deciding on a first all grain recipe right this second, then heading to the supply store. I'm thinking of a simplish stout... too cold out to go with something hoppy.

Maybe...

12 lbs Maris Otter
1.5 lbs Chocolate Malt
1 lb Roasted Barley
0.5 lb Red Wheat
2 lb Crystal 120L

2 oz Willamette @ 60 min

and maybe Essex Ale Yeast...

It was a solid brewing day despite the fact that I knocked my electronic thermometer into my swamp cooler while pitching the yeast.
I ended up with a 1.070ish range OG, and the 71 IBU's aren't overpowering the Maris Otter malt profile.
The White Lab California V yeast is already starting to bubble up good in the fermenter.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow. I have a plan, I think, will have to refine it today. Gonna mash for a total final after-boil volume of 6.25 gallons, then leave 1.25 in the boiler. To that I will add some portion of the leftover bag of light pilsner extract I still have to up the gravity a good bit, and that 1.25 gals will go into my other oak barrel to become the second Tiny Terror batch.

I FUCKING WISH CATS WOULD CHECK THIS THREAD AND GIVE ME ADVICES AND SHIT.

Most of the way through the batch. The fuck, Cats, put that baby down and offer me sage advice.

sorry i was working in san francisco for a few days. i am back holding the baby now.
how did it go?

It went fucking great. I mean it "takes longer" but it doesn't seem to be more work, if that makes sense. I really, really enjoyed it a lot. Everything worked WELL, minimal temp loss over 60 mins of mashing, I made notes so I know where to heat the strike water to next time (20F drop, not 25F). Used Nottingham yeast again (the ones that went berserk in my Porter and exploded all over the closet), and sure enough the buggers were BOTH (2 carboys, because I split the batch and made a 7% and a 12.5% ABV version) fermenting within one fucking hour. 3 days later the Tiny Terror batch was down from 1.10 to 1.032, so I went ahead a racked it to an oak barrel. It's sloooowly bubbling through the airlock up on top of the fridge, burping out the best smell in the world.

So the split-batch thing....

- At the end of an hour's boil, I had 6 gallons of wort made from all-grain mash and a 2oz bag of whole leaf Willamette, boiled the full hour.
- I drew out 4 gallons of it and started cooling that 4 gallons immediately.
- The remaining 2 gallons got 3 lb's of Light Pilsner DME added, plus the last 2 ounces of Centennial pellets I bought almost a year ago, been in the freezer ever since. This I boiled for another 20 mins or so. The color lightened even as it thickened, so now instead of "inky black" like the 4 gallon portion, it's "thickass melted milk chocolate."
- I then cooled the Tiny Terror 2 gallon batch separately, and once each batch was cool enough it got a full pack of Nottinhgham dry that had been started the usual way. The 4 Gal batch went into a 6 gal fermentor, the TT batch went into a 5 gal. Both bubbled like hell with magnificent krausens for 2 days, then settled down to a glacially slow bubble pace.
- Sunday I found myself with 30 mins free somehow, and decided to get the TT racked to a barrel even though it's not fully done.

I'll sample again in a week, see where the grav is at, and once its done full I'll transfer the beer to a bottling bucket, rinse out the yeast trub from the barrel, then re-rack to it and store for months and months. That way it doesn't sit on dormant yeast and pick up off flavors. Should've waited to barrel, but couldn't help it.

Make sense?

The back porch setup - running off from the mash tun to the kettle. I shortened the hose after this, to about 2.5 feet. So I have a nice short section and longer section. REALLY wish I had a bulkhead on the kettle too, and now I totally want a tower setup with gravity feed. I completely get it in a way that you sorta can't until you gently pour 6 gallons of scalding hot liquid by yourself.