Monday, March 19, 2012

Pumpkin Cranberry Sour in the keg

It's been a while since I've had beer in the keg for me to just go about drinking, so this weekend I finally got around to getting that damn Pumpkin Cranberry Sour blended it was 3 gallons Pumpkin Cranberry and 2 of the Sour pale.  At the time of the kegging, I would say it was a bit of a bust and I'm already working on what I will do the next time I try this.  First thing, way less pumpkin 12lbs is so over the top pointless I'm not sure what the hell my problem is.  Second thing I found an organic unsweetened, no preservative cranberry juice at a grocery store, it's $8 for the bottle vs $6/bag of cranberries.  I put 4 bags of cranberries in and I could only sort of see the color of the berries show up after the last addition.  Way too much money on an adjunct that is barely discernible in the finished product.  The liquid juice should have a much more noticeable effect on the outcome.
Third and final thing will be, I need to be more diligent about getting beers into secondary fermenters.  They spend way too much time on the yeast cakes picking up funk, for overall quality I need to just man up and do it.

All that said I apparently need to buy some keg lube, I will be damned if I could get a decent seal on my keg last night I tried two different lids and finally abandoned hope and grabbed the Vaseline.  It's not food grade and there is a good deal of argument as far as I can tell about the long term effects of the petroleum on the seal, but I'll be damned if I was going to bed with out CO2 on that bad boy so lack of consensus be damned!  I got seal, and I will check it again this evening to see how things are going.

3 comments:

  1. Home brewery is something I want to try as soon as I move to collage. I'm a fan of porter, but this kind of beer doesn't seem to be good for a beginner. What was the first recipe that you tried?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are not the fist to ask. Here is a really long into to brewing post I did. I think red ales are a very forgiving first beer I did. You can see that recipe here. Just look around, the Homebrew and Beer tags go to my beer posts and several of them are fairly informative.

      Delete
  2. I must give brewing another try...

    ReplyDelete