Going to do a different smash brew tomorrow night. Marris otter \ willamette \ Scottish ale yeast. Hardest part is not throwing in additional hops and malts in the store. But I think I'll learn from this little bit of restrain. Both recipes are 10lbs of malt and 3 oz of hops.

I have fought that demon. It can be SO hard not to just pick up more.

I kept saying things to myself like "maybe just a little carapils for head retention"..."maybe some flaked adjunct to make it silky"... "maybe some honey malt, i want to try honey malt" but I kept it straight.

I ran my grains through the store mill twice to see if that helps my efficiency. The crush that thing gives is no where near as fine as what I see on lots of people's youtubes. Doing a normal mashout and everything in the cooler doesn't seemto get me above the BIAB method at all. I'm still hitting around 62%. Lots of people claim crush as the the biggest culprit so this should bump me up a little from Sunday's performance.

Tasted/measured my IIPA last night. OG of 1.082 and it made it all the way to 1.013.
I could drink this whole batch uncarbonated straight out of the fermentor it's so fucking good.
2 more days of dry hopping and then bottling this weekend.

Holy fuck that sounds delicious. I am about ready to bottle 9 gallons of IIPA myself. Hope it's good, because there's a lot of it.

that's like 20 gallons of regular. you gonna be drunk for a while.

pale ales go quickly in my house now that my wifewilleatyou has finally decided that she likes them better than pilsners. changed her usual order from stella to two hearted. wifewilleatyou and sisterinlaw tasted and loved the uncarbonated IIPA also. they both thought it tasted like a surly. i don't quite agree but i will take that as a compliment either way.

Eventually I plan blend white wine and IIPA. I just have to learn how to make white wine first.

Spend 10 years learning about agriculture, become wealthy, buy a huge hillside of land, spend ten years more getting vines to mature, and then you're all set.

Quick Cats - tell me what to brew next and I'll do it. Just got a chance to go to the store at 5 today. Lay it on me - no lagers though. I want someone else to drive this time.

do an irish red ale

Well, I've never done one, and never even looked them up. Will be good to try before I go to Ireland in October.

These 2 SMASH beers I started this week were nearly identical in brewing process. Enough so for me to learn that running the grains through the store mill twice boosted my efficiency from ~62% to ~70%...maybe even as much as ~72%. I just need to double check how much volume ended up in the carboy. Either way it made a big difference, will definitely be doing that from now on.

Noooo shit?

The dunkelweisen was just ok - all tasters agree the ale I did of your recipe was better.

Next up is my friend hard cider, done the low rent way of dumping yeast into a gallon jug of juice and putting an airlock on it. Seems to be slowing down so I guess I chuck it in the fridge for a few days, move it to a clean bottle, and get my drank on? And/or bottle it, wait another few weeks, get drank on? Do I fridge it with airlock or with a cap? Have any of y'all attempted?

Was there potassium sorbate added to the juice by company that distributes the product? It will prevent your yeast from being able to ferment the sugars and reproducing. Other than that I don't really have any advice for you. The only person I know who made cider recently did so by going to an orchard and pressing apples, and I drank the finished product out of a keg last 4th of July.

Never done it, but you're in bordeline Prison Toilet Wine territory there. Which is to say I am all ears and tell me how that shit goes. Surely it cannot come out too well...

lolz.

Bottling the IIPA was a shitstorm.
I mixed in enough sugar (got that bottling sugar this time) for 5 gallons.
The hops sucked up a good 3/4 of a gallon.
Also I was prob below 5 gallons to begin with.
Hopefully these don't start exploding.
I will start opening bottles in 1 week.

I had no good way of squeezing the wort out of the hops without splashing.
So I filtered and funneled that 3/4 of a gallon. Splashed it crazily into a 1 gallon jug.
It's just sitting in my fridge. Not gonna carbonate it...just going to guzzle it quickly over the next couple days.
It's like some sort of delicious hoppy wine.
Prison terlet wine.

Mistakes were made.

Want.

No preservatives, following the wisdom of the intertubes and using Whole Foods organic that comes in its own gallon glass jug. My brewing buddy's wife really wants us to make something non-beer in recompense for stinking up her kitchen every couple of weeks.

These folks all seemed to survive experiments!

http://www.thepauperedchef.com/2009/11/ ... cider.html

http://www2.citypaper.com/eat/story.asp?id=19640

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When I got home from work last night, I had two big glasses. I'm really glad that I didn't just toss it.
It's so good right now. Pretty boozy too.

After that I got into my mead...which tastes a thousand times better than any mead I've ever tried. I've only had a few but they've always been real aggressive and sweet. Mine is smooth and dry and not stupidly sweet. This is at 4 months right now. Time to bottle and attempt to hide it from myself. Need to start batch 2 of the mead right away.

After that I walked around the neighborhood barefoot and went to bed with all my clothes on, apparently.

Sounds like a good weekend.

Gonna have to bottle my 9 gallons of iipa sometime this week in the evening, when the girls are home. Can't take the time off, and it needs to get done this week. Friday I leave with Neuro for the annual motocamping trip, so it's gotta happen one night between now and then. Summers are motherfucking busy.

In the meantime the pipeline is almost Bone Dry. All that's left are the bizarro December Experiment beers, which are a wildly over-carbed stout (11%) and a completely un-carbed barleywine (10%), both having been oak barreled. So I mix them, to make a caramel/oaky sort of porter black and tan. It's actually not bad, but it's also not my first choice for what to drink as I work on shit around the house all day Saturday.

Shit, man, decent cider is dead easy. I can imagine many improvements but literally opening the bottle, pouring out a few ounces, dumping in some Saflager-23 and an airlock and leaving it in a cooler in the basement for ten days gives a nice, maybe 4% alcohol, pleasantly fizzy apply drink. At seven bucks a gallon or so. I am totally ready to have trade goods in prison, if they allow whole foods organic juice of course.

Nooo kidding. Well, as the wife is glutarded, I will be investigating.

So did you bottle it like a normal beer?

I picture myself using several gallons of apple juice, then adding ginger and pineapple or whatever for different varieties. Then bottling it as per normal.

Speaking of bottling, I did 95 bottles last night, covering both batches of the Doubleish IPA. Started when the Girl went to bed at 8:30, finished at 12:30. First batch (14# 2-row, 1# honey malt) was 6.4% abv and had about 4.2 gallons to bottle. Second batch (16# 2-row, 2# honey malt) was 6.9% abv and had just under 5 gallons. Second batch smelled / tasted the best, but who knows. We have an airbnb guest staying with us for 3 weeks from Spain, and he was fascinated. Literally hung out in the kitchen watching, asking questions, or snapping photos from 9 until I turned out the lights.

I didn't - it seems that the self-carbing cider is a little fussier to bottle, so since it was only a gallon I just racked (this is the terminology for using the siphon, etc, yes?) it to another gallon jug, invited the other couple over for brats, and the four of us drank most of it. Assume I only have a few days to finish it off but that should not be troublesome.

If I were doing it again I would use a yeast that's happier in a warmer setting so I didn't have to dump freezer packs on it all the time to keep it going, maybe dump in some frozen apple concentrate so it's boozier and applier, and read up on bottling a bit more - I guess it can be hard to have any residual sweetness since the yeasts will eat the whole thing until killed dead. It seems like some yeasts age well and others just don't, and I'm not sure which is right for my basement.

Also, I love that your brewing setup will turn out the be the highlight of that guy's vacation. Super cool.

Cider smelled quite yeasty, so the folks who got the old Chimay glasses were the losers (at least one didn't like the smell at all, though I found it fine if not great). May have accidentally disturbed the cake at the bottom - it was very opaque and thus hard to be as careful as I expect I should have been.