Sorry I missed the question up there. I kept letting First Mate have samples along the way to zero gravity, and she said "dryer." So i let it go to zilch. Then I primed and bottled just like beer, and now they're lightly carbed and very good. I can't really taste the Saaz, it's so mild, and we both like them a lot. We let Neuro / Neurette try some, and they said it was very dry, like white wine. It's funny, because I can't really tell anymore. Too used to it? At any rate it's nowhere near "puckering" dry, and still is very obviously cidery and appley. And it sure as shitola was easier than pasteurizing.

Oh and damned ol Whole Foods has half gallons of cider now, and it's these saem guys, Carlson Orchards. But it's clearly a different mix, it's darker brown and cloudy. Mine was much clearer and lighter in color.

That's awesome that the Maris pale is a hit. So simple, but with good hops it really jumps. Speaking of, I need to make more.

Yeah, I have fun with the bags of grain and such for more complicated recipes, and the maris is often out of stock and always pricier but those are the beers that people not just being nice to me love.

Starting an Anchor Steam clone soon, want to have it for the holidays. My late father's favorite beer, always hard to find in SC growing up.

Lager yeast fermented warm, right?

Warmish, IIRC - not as warm as ale, but warm-for-a-lager with CA Common.

You able to control that actively, or just doing a passive basement / blanket type thing?

Basement/blanket - why we're waiting for it to get cooler. The chest freezer/johnson controls setup is out of commission til we get through the cow share

I need a basement.

My homebrew club is hosting its annual Teach your friend to Homebrew day and home brew equipment swap meet on Saturday at Zipline Brewing Company. AHA Teach your friend to Homebrew day was last Saturday, but we didn't want to compete with a home football game for the Huskers.

I also bought the ingredients for my Honey Rye Belgian Ale yesterday and hope to brew on Tuesday.

p.s. I can drop the ambient temperature of my fermenter down to the mid to high 50's for an extended period of time with my swamp cooler and a few 16oz bottles of ice during the fall/winter months. It's getting it to rapidly chill to the low 50's that is damn near impossible, and why I have never tried making any lagers.

I brewed my Honey Rye Belgian Ale this morning. I'm going to call it Le Pere Fouettard, since it is my holiday beer. I think it should end up being pretty similar to a Rye Dubbel sans the dark candi syrup, since the OG, ABV, SRM, IBU and malt profile is quite similar to a standard Dubbel.

Cider people: #2 was finally fucking bottled last night. #3 is still in the carboy, waiting. I have had zero fucking brew time.

Number 2 is the one I boiled down 2 pounds of blueberries and an ounce of cascade for, then dry hopped with another 3 ounces of cascade. Note the ruby red color -- the other one is just straight apples and yeast, and it's straw colored. This one smells really, really good, already tastes nice.



So I had this thought a few weeks ago that I'd carb it and sweeten it up a little (hops and blueberries add to the bitterness a little, so it's a bit much for most folks without any help) by just adding a gallon of fresh cider, bottling, and then pasteurizing it after a few days when samples taste right / there's some carbonation. When I went to the closet to do this, the gallon of pasteurized cider (from the same orchards, which is cool) was swolen and beginning to ferment on its own. So... it must be really fucking hard to KEEP cider from becoming booze. Even pasteurized cider will just "go rogue" in a room temp closet. I was a little worried, because I NEED that sugar in there, and I didn't want the wild yeast to have gotten it all. But it still tastes very sweet so the yeast hadn't gone too far yet. I used the whole gallon. Just poured it in with the bottling bucket, stirred well, and bottled all 6 gallons.

It tastes so good now - sweeter than usual and lightly bubbly, that I may arrest fermentation tonight with a 190F hot bath.

Nice! I'm impressed.

Think my knockoff Pliny worked well, though I won't be sure until the last of this cold clears out of my face. The German lager that sat in the chest freezer for twelve weeks is lovely - darker color than I expected but the flavor's right on target. There was an alarming mold scunge on top when we went to bottle, but the Google said to skim it off and carry on, which we did with no evident bad consequences.

Mold scrunge?! Damn.

I mean, it could be flocculated yeast. I dunno. It looked like mold to me. Tried hard not to get any of it in the bottles, seemed to work. Really tastes great - gave some to a german friend of mine and he was pretty rhapsodic. Won't let it sit around too long though just in case...

That is just kickass. The successes make the whole thing worth it. I've been brewing so many things just to learn, as opposed to brewing just to enjoy, that I really need to go back to a tried / true recipe for the next few batches. I'm glad I'm learning, but we keep having people over, and the Mrs says "oh yle probably has a homebrew for you - Kyle what's in the fridge?" and I have to explain that all I have is a black IPA that has skunky old new zealand hops in it that taste slightly like old gym socks, and a porter that tastes like cardboard and grape juice because I used maple syrup in it and the yeast didn't take the bait.

We are trying all the fun kits to get a sense of what goes into different flavors without much risk that it'll go horribly wrong and then tweaking/combining things we think produced stuff we liked. Less adventurous but few duds. Long time to catch up to your bold experiments!

FINALLY fucking brewed beer again. Last time was October 30th... fuck me. Since then I cranked out 2 more batches of cider, but the third went bad because I waited too long to bottle it. I just never fucking had time, with the holidays and work. Went to do it this past weekend, and there were little floating white spots in it. I knew something was up. Sure enough, it smelled wrong. Down the drain went 5 gallons.

Made the normal pale ale I do:

8# Maris
0.75# Crystal 20
0.75# Crystal 40
US-05 Ale Yeast (chico, basically)
5 ounces (this time, last time was 3) of Cascade hops, tossed in at -10 mins... nothing else. Gets enough bitter from just 10 mins and I get a good late-add fresh hop hit.

... because after so many "experiment" beers I need something normal for me and guests. But my daughter broke my spec grav meter, and this is the second time, so I think I'll be ordering the sight-glass kind. But I couldn't tell what was going on for shit. I just did what I always do. Hit 154 for the mash, went 90 mins, stirred it 3 times during, sparged quick with 2 more gallons at 170, boiled a little shorter than usual at 45 mins because I only had 5.5 gallons to boil. Hops in at -10mins, smells good. Set up and started bubbling late that night. OH -- and I used the new wort chiller I made, and fuck yeah that thing hauled the beer down to like 65F in maybe 10 minutes tops. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED if you don't have one, Bluejay. Mine was easy to make, kinda fun even, and a lot less $ than buying one. Plus mine has the outflow valve, so I didn't waste as much water... I felt the outflow line, and if it was super cold then the flow was too strong - no point in running so much water through there that it can't suck out all the heat, I figure. I turned it down til the water coming out was a little warm, and still only ran it ten mins tops.

Fingers crossed. I'll have no idea what the alcohol content is exactly. ...using the ol' Gut Hydrometer, or as motorcyclists would say the "butt dyno."

Thought I might get a chiller for Christmas but didn't - not sure I'm badass enough to make my own. But I like the idea...

Here it is so cold that ales won't go in the basement. Suspect the very slow going milk stout is suffering for it. Up next a less brave firestone knockoff kit, Santa Barbara nostalgia driven.

There's a byob restaurant here, fairly fancy - they will serve you your own home brew all fancy like! I am thinking of taking in a big bottle and putting it in the champagne bucket

I finished coming up with a couple recipes last week, but I probably won't brew again for another week or two. The first beer I need to make is my entry into the Nebraska Shootout, a club only competition with a limited number of categories. The categories this year are Cat.5 (Bock), Cat. 6 (Light Hybrid), Cat. 12 (Porter), Cat. 16 (French and Belgian Ales). I'm going to brew an American Rye Ale, since I don't really feel like brewing a Porter or a Saison right now.

Then I want brew an Imperial Stout that will be aged on oak chips soaked in Wild Turkey. They ABV will most likely fall a little short of 9%, but it will still be pretty formidable.

That pale slowed WAY down in the fermentor. Fuck I wish I had a hydrometer. It smells and tastes fine, it's progessed for sure, but... never had one just go slowly for 24 hours then go semi-comatose. Hands off for 2 weeks, I guess, and I'll just see what happened.

Hey -- Anybody ever used one of those sight glass Brix hydrometers? Thinking of ordering one like right now.

I've used a Brix hydrometer once or twice, but I don't really have use for one.
They really do a nice job of helping you determine your gravity in a minimal time.

I'm going to go with one, and a bottle of 100 pH strips.

For christmas I got the incredibly dense-but-wonderful Oxford Companion to Beer, which was put together by Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn Brewery. It is massive. It covers more or less everything relevant to beer, both the making and the enjoying of it. It's alphabetical, by topic. I'm just reading it like a novel, so last night was mostly about Achel brewery, acids, and Abbey beers. I cannot stress enough how incredibly interesting it was. Just enough water chemistry and microbiology to explain what's going on without actually diagramming out molecules. Anywho, all that acid talk led me to suspect pH as one of my lingering issues, and hell I think you and or Cats have mentioned it too. So I'd like to begin monitoring both my pH and my spec grav during the mash much more closely.

Huh. Sounds neat and looks very cool. I got the simpler Brewing Classic Styles but haven't done anything from it yet. My palate is getting snootier as I make more stuff, so I assume things will get weirder as and if I talk brewing buddy into more exotic adventures.

Where do pH troubles come from? Your water, or something in the process? I have tons of pH paper left from the kiddo's science project...

Your water, and your mash, usually. Beer should normally be around 5.2, and it's often a little higher, requiring some help in the form of salts to up the acidity, I guess. Appurrrntly I should start monitoring pH and dissolved oxygen if I really wanna know what I'm tossing my poor yeast into, ie whether or not they'll like it. I know I experimented once with a pH salt, and that beer was probably my best yield. Could've been other factors, but several other things make me suspect I am in the 6's, and not down where the yeast would be happiest.

I'll keep reading.

OK, the box came. I got:

- Refractometer (the thing that uses 2 drops of liquid, and you look through it and it tells you the spec grav in seconds)
- Long-ass stainless spoon... no more bbq fork
- pH strips
- 4oz of Centennial and 1oz of Simcoe, just to get the order to within 45 cents of the gift card amount

Thoughts:

- Refractometer appears to kick as much / more ass as I hoped. Easy to calibrate, easy to take a reading. Coupla drops, look through it at bright light, and a line appears across a scale that shows you "normal" spec grav (1.050 etc) and Brix. Comes in a nice case, pretty well made, shoulda gotten one sooner.
- pH strips are fine I guess, but....

I checked the pH and spec grav of my pale, which has been in the ferm for over a week, and both are troubling I think. The spec grav appears to be 1.029 still, which is gonna suck ass if true. I re-pitched some yeast that I started overnight, and even those fuckers looked half dead this morning. It's progressed, but appears to have stalled. Also, the pH is showing up as like 4.6, which is a lot lower than the wort should be (5.2-5.5), but maybe that's normal for semi-finished beer? Googling the fuck out of it now. Worried.

Edit... turns out 4.3-4.6 is normal for finished beer. Well thank fucking jebus.