Beer update snippet

I escaped for an afternoon and brewed with a friend a little over a week ago, I have a citra pale ale sitting in secondary on a 1oz addition of citra hops. It's cloudy because we didn't put moss in the boil kettle and at this point looks a lot like a little lighter Manny's Pale ale (his pale is almost copper).

Should be about 5.6% abv all said and done.

I'm vaguely tempted to leave it cloudy (I like that about Manny's), but since it's going into a keg and I hate haveing to clean my keg after a dirty beer I'll probably cold crash it hard and see how clear I can get it.

Blackberry Wheat and Hopville goes down

A few weeks ago I finally managed to get back on the brewing horse and get a beer done. It's in the barrel soaking up some oak, and that sadly means I need to start dreaming about the next batch to put in the damn thing. For the curious until May 6th you can see the recipe here on Hopville.

I'm starting to think I need a bigger primary fermenter as the nearly 6.5 gallon barrel requires just a tad bit more beer than I can fit in the space my bucket provides. So far I've been managing that by using my 3 gallon glass fermenter to hold the excess needed to top up the barrel, but it's introduced lots of racking to my process. For normal beers that's probably fine, but when you brew weird beers with fruit and other crap that plug up racking lines it's less fine. When you do have all that crap and want to filter some of it out...it's a lot less fine. I have an idea for how to do a great job filtering out stuff, but it would mean putting everything into a second vessel before transferring it into the barrel; racking is stressful enough without introducing an extra resting stop. I'm pretty sure I managed to get way too much oxygen into it the way I went about it this time so I'm probably going to revisit the intermediary filter vessel.

Shit like this makes me want a conical fermenter, even though it wouldn't take care of the the floating fruit conundrum. Maybe a conical with a false bottom? It would catch the largest particulate, but the meshing would have to be pretty fine to make the whole thing work. Oh equipment, you are a never ending conundrum.

To my next point, Hopville. So recently Hopville got purchased by another company, which makes me a bit sad as I've been using it as my recipe storage and brew process assistant. It looks like the new company BrewToad is going to be a good steward, and I have hope that their recipe manager will be an improvement over the buggy beta limbo Hopville has been trapped in for the 8 months or so. It did inspire me to checkout other pieces of software again. Hopville had been a relatively painless way of managing stuff, and my short trial of beersmith was around the same time I started brewing so I found the process cloying as a novice brewer. It asked for a lot of information to even get started, and on the whole wasn't how I wanted to spend my limited amount of hobby hours. I'm tempted to give the Beersmith 2 android app a try though. It looked kind of slick for brew day, as each step had a timer you could hit start on to help keep track of time.

Progress of sorts

Man, my projects eat me alive.

So I'm working on power carving a wooden skull, and managed to completely burn out my black and decker rotary tool (think off brand dremel).  I still have a dremel, but I'm afraid that the tool isn't up for the task to I bought a more heavy duty rotary tool rated at 1/4 horsepower and bought a few different wood rasp tool tips to work on the details.  I was also having a hard time visualizing how the jaw connects so I bought a model skull.  All of that should be arriving today or tomorrow.  I'm not super sure of when I'm going to get back into that project, but the parts are here.

I 've been working on making a false bottom for my mash tun using the base of an old keg.  I burnt through the only cut off wheel I had on hand so I had to get some more, and didn't have a spanner wrench (I've been using the ghetto pliers method of unscrewing the nut) so I got a spanner wrench and a flap wheel to smooth the whole business down when I'm done shaping it.  I'm reasonably sure I may end up back at that hardware shop to help with my stand off's or at the very least a handle for the thing.  I'm also going to need a carbide bit for all the holes I'm going to drill in this damn thing.  The cut lines are mostly marked, but I need to decide on a design for legs to hold it off the bottom of the mash tun.  I'm reasonably confident that I'm only about 4 hours from done on this project, now I just need 4 hours to work on it.

I'm also working on a CNC machine.  I've come to the conclusion that since I don't have a functioning mill or cnc to do the work on I'm going to outsource the fabrication of my motor to drive shaft couplers so I need to get out the calipers and design the part so I can get it ordered.

What about you, what things are you doing to waste your free time?

This dude's mad!

If you're brewing and interested in science, and funk and good writing about beer why are you not following The Mad Fermentationist?  I've posted about him before I think, but damn it this guy I want to come apprentice on a brew with him or something.  Some part for just pure curiosity, and the rest because I feel like there is so much I would learn from him.  On of his recent posts was on wort fermentability, he's linking to a few different article with regards to adjuncts and specialty grains effect on wort fermentability, and talking about other factors at play.

In any event I can say that I've seen some beers get into insanely low final gravity, the lowest I've recorded was 1.006 the recipe is here, and as you can see it was Marris Otter, crystal 40 and crystal 10.  All of the interesting bits to this beer where from oak and hops, but it was one of my favorite beers in so much as I drank the majority of the 5 gallons on my own in around 2 months.  I'm fairly sure I had switched to my igloo cooler for mashing by this point, and was doing 90 minute boils.

It's heady stuff to think about and going forward my mashing process will been taking longer than my boil times, and I'm working on getting above 75% efficiency. I think that I'm already quite a bit a head of that, because of my secondary runnings/side batches but I haven't been taking good notes during the process so I haven't been trying to do blended averages and efficiency calculations.  I need to do measurements of wort pre-boil and take good notes to get an actual idea of what's going on.  In total I ended up with almost 9 gallons of beer on the day of my American Strong brewing, but I used 6lbs of malt extract in the main portion and added specialty grains and 1lb of dry extract on the side batch that was 2.5 gallons but included some of the primary batch because it was too much for my primary fermenter ect, ect.  In short beer was everywhere and I didn't write down what I did so all of this is from my vague memory of what happened that day.

Cascade Dark Ale

Racked into the oak last night, and I had interned to dry hop in the barrel, then I realized how tiny the bung hole is and decided I'm going to dry hop later.

I think I'm going to call this beer The Hop burner, with just shy of 8oz of hops and only 63IBU's.  I found another open 1oz pouch of hop pellets in my freezer.  I'm apparently very wasteful with my hops.

Any way well see how it goes with the oak, when I put it in the barrel the coffee roasty flavors where the dominate notes. I'm thinking head retention won't be an issue with this beer.  In 10 days my yeast took it from 1.083 to 1.024 (I didn't temperature adjust so it may be lower).

Beer Postings

Man beer postings just seem to lack their emotional punch without pictures don't they?

Well tough I didn't take any pictures so I'm just going to have to rely on my words to describe my most recent cockup in brew making.  I was on vacation for the last week, and thusly didn't have a beer ready to go back into the oak barrel when my "guest brewer" got done with it.  He did a wee heavy in it, and delivered it to my home rinsed and waiting for some beer to go back into it on Saturday.  Sadly I didn't have anything for the thirsty barrel so I went about correcting that.  I needed to compress the brew times and I wanted to do an IPA, so I settled on doing a Cascadian dark ale (aka Black IPA).  You can find my recipe here, it was a collaboration with my brew store beer savant and I did it extract for the convenience of time.  All said it was still about 4ish hours of work for a 1.083 syrupy mess.

Because it was a largish batch with high gravity I gave my yeast a head start with some corn sugar and yeast nutrient in about 1/3 of a gallon of water.  Over the course of the brew day I came to discover that my trusty digital thermometer had bit the dust and was reading inaccurately, so I was flying blind for a large chunk of the day.  When the day was done I had almost 7 gallons in my fermenter and that left and uncomfortably small amount of room for the krausen to work.  I stayed up until almost 2am listening to the airlock bubble away happily before deciding it might just stay in there.  When I woke up 8 hours later I had a huge mess, krausen gushing out the top of my bucket and filling my chest freezer turned kegorator.  In all I'd say I lost about 1/2 a gallon of what is going to be 8%ish abv beer.  It was a true day of mourning as I tried to clean it up, split the batch into a second fermenter to try and contain it.  All I can say is Danstar's Nottingham yeast is a monster, it powered through and as of last night was settled down, with the krausen almost completely collapsed, the airlock slowed to a mere bubble a minute or so.  I'm tempted to rack to the barrel just to be done monitoring the damn thing,  but first I have to come up with a way to strain out all the damn hops still floating around in there.  Whole leaf hops are such a pain in the ass.

Any how that's all I've got to say about that.

To ABFTS's question about how the american strong tastes, it's like doing a whiskey drop in a pale ale.  Scotch ales have a darker malt profile (and are offensively bitter), american strong is just a really high gravity pale ale.  Look at the grain bill, it's copper colored wort, and moved more towards amber from the char on the oak.  So far the feed back on it has been pretty solid, my gripe is the head retention is near nonexistent because of the whiskey and oak.  I've probably over compensated on the cascade dark ale, but I like some head when I pour.

Holiday Beer

Nothing says holiday spirit better than beer am I right?

Yesterday my Dad and I bottled up my American Strong aged in a whiskey oak barrel.  Topping off at around 9% ABV and smelling (and tasting) strongly of whiskey I'd say this was an excellent showing for my brewing effort.  The side batch of 3ish gallons of lower gravity wort finished carbonating but the one we opened seemed a little flat to me.  I had almost 3x's as much corn sugar in this batch and it took off bubbling so fiercely that it bubbled out of my carboy before settling down.  I'm actually more concerned about bottle bombs more than I am about under carbonation.

So Solstice has come and gone, and that leaves me tapped out for pagan holidays for a while I suppose.  Sure theirs new years eve, which could be interpreted as pagan (or at the very least adopted as) but having a kid seems to suck the fun out of those types of celebrations.  Stay warm and merry, (if that's your thing).

Small updates and thankfulness

Well it was an uneventful thanksgiving (minus one parent having a meltdown and generally pissing everyone off) and it was amazing to spend so much time with my son over the long weekend.  He's just over a year old now, and I cannot believe how little "baby" I see in him.  He communicates somewhat with sign language, has clearly defined likes and dislikes, and is such a sweetheart.  Last night when my wife laid him down for bed he rolled over and blew her a kiss.

Lady Killer.  For real.  It's a good thing we not competing for the woman in our life, because I would loose daily.  For all that he's a boy, pushes boundaries at every turn, and has so little fear of anything.  I had two cell phones in my hands (kid loves the technology) and he wanted them, so I handed him one while I was trying to get directions on the other.  He kept reaching for the other one (it's screen was on so he wanted that one) and when I told him he hand one and pointed at the one in his hand, he looked at the phone and then looked me dead in the eye and chucked the phone out of his car seat!  He's barely mastered walking and he moved on to climbing.  Couches, chairs, stairs, baby gates, beds.  Yeah, I have smart and destructive monkey that runs around my house all day long.  He walks like a drunk circus clown, but he doesn't miss a thing.  You leave it in his arm reach he's going to find it, and chew on it.

Nothing is safe, but I like the evolving challenge of it all.

On the beer front, the american strong went into the barrel on Friday and that whiskey smells so amazing.  I need to get something brewing this weekend, but that seems like so much work to me right now.

My Soured Vanilla Bourbon Robust Porter needs to go into bottles, the Soured Oatmeal Stout needs to be bottled, and finally the small beer from the American Strong (3 gallons worth) needs to be bottled.  That's a lot of beer work that I'm talking about doing this week, so brewing again lands fairly low on the todo list for some reason.  I'm assuming that the American strong will only be able to last about 2 maybe 3 weeks in the barrel before the oak overwhelms it so if I do another beer this weekend it will be ready to go in the barrel in 8-14 days.  Hopefully  the second beer can sit on the oak a little longer than the first one so I can slow down a bit, otherwise I'm going to have to start recruiting the local bums to come drink my beer!  I mean friends, local friends.  I'm not sure I have enough bottles for almost 11 gallons of beer, I may have to keg some just for lack of space.  I made a gallon of the supper weak runnings of my American strong that I threw the lee's of New Belgium's Brett Beer onto.  If that took I could blend the 3 gallons and that one gallon in the keg for a lightly soured blended beer on tap.  I'm probably the only one I know that likes this stuff so, who cares what the haters think.

Decoction and Infusion in a world of limited mash tun volumes

If the Title didn't throw you, this blog post is sure to do the trick.  Since I brewed over the weekend, beer nerd is in full effect as I contemplate the wins and losses of the weekend of brewing.  Decoction and Infusion  are two different styles of mashing which is raising the temperature of and washing the sugar out of grain.  Infusion is the most straight forward to understand so I'll start there.  The basic premise is you have malted and crushed grain that you need to extract sugar from.  The malting process has made enzymes available to start acting on starches, milling the grain has freed the starches and enzymes from their husks and now we need to hit various temperatures for the enzymes to activate.  There's a good deal of science that will explain what happens at the various temperatures, but this chart is a handy enough reference for our purpose here.

The beer I brewed this weekend had a grain bill of 15 lbs, which is pretty big for the 10 gallon cooler that I use as a mash tun, if I followed the traditional proscription of 1.25 quarts/lb I would be an initial infusion of about 4.6 gallons at dough in, then added the second infusion of 2.7 gallons and the third of 2.7 gallons for a 104 - 140 - 158°F rest schedule, the water alone would be enough to overfill the cooler.  With grains added infusion mashing of adding boiling water to reach my rest temperatures was not possible with my equipment. So decoction was the only option that would work for my grain bill and equipment.  If I'm reading correctly the "proper" decoction method is done by removing a portion of the grains and boiling them and return it to the mash.  The method I used was somewhere between infusion and decoction in that I used the ball valve to draw off wort from the bottom (about 1/2 gallon at a time) to boil and return to the mash.

This method worked for my purposes and got me to about 75% efficiency (measured) which is probably the highest I've managed on any mix of equipment to date.  In the past I've mashed using my keggle as the mash tun and directly fired the mash to raise/maintain temperatures.  I like using the cooler because the mash stays within +/- 1°F of the temperature you put it in at making it much easier to hold temps for whatever the mash schedule is.  I'm reading a lot of different information about the rest schedule with opinions on the "ideal" time for each rest ranging greatly, from just 10 minutes up to 90!  I've followed a few different sites recommendations and the longer rests have just extended my brew day, but haven't improved my yields or flavor as far as I can tell.  I think that it will take a few more brews with my current equipment setup to get a real feel for it, but my current inclination is to stick with John Palmer's mash schedule and do my modified decoction process.  The only item I'm inclined to add to my process at this point in a true false bottom for my mash tun, as the stainless steel braid is annoying me.  it feels like towards the bottom half of draining the wort the tube gets plugged up and the flow the the wort slows considerably.  To counter this, I use my stirring paddle to kind of rub the hose and pull the grain away from it enough for the liquid to flow to the hose, which speeds up the flow considerably, but requires somewhat constant attention to get the mash tun completely drained.  From some reading on the matter the false bottom might not help with the thing that is truly bothering me, as I'm not doing the "sparge" correctly.  My problem is called a stuck sparge, but I'm not adding liquid to the top of the grain bed as I drain wort so I've been doing it wrong.
 
This kind of makes me feel like an idiot, but it also makes me confused.  What does one do with the water that you've now added to the grain while you drained?  You'll have 6 or so more gallons of very, very lightly sugary water to deal with.  I drained it and cooked it down but the wort was only 1.014 OG, and Palmer recommends you collect down to 1.008 or until you have collected enough wort.  With this about 5 gallons of low gravity wort you could cook it down on low heat, but your talking about a good deal of time to accomplish this task.

Sweet mother of beer

I was a very busy brewing bee over the weekend knocking out a solid American Strong Ale with 6 gallons looking to be 8.1% abv 3 gallons around 4.5% abv (it's a blended og, with so many assumptions in there my head hurts) and 1 gallon at around 1.5% abv.  Pictured here, my keggorator, super sweet cooler mash tun, 6 gallon primary fermenter, 3 gallon fermenter. and a 1 gallon glass jug playing as fermenter all happily bubbling along and inexpensive vodka for topping up the airlocks.

Assuming everything goes to plan I should be able to get the big bucket transferred into the barrel sometime next week, I cannot make up my mind if I want to put the beer in the glass fermenter for a few days before sot that it is more fully attenuated

More barrel stuff

No sooner do I commit to a whiskey barrel then I find out I could have gotten one in my own back yard!

Woodinville Whiskey company sells them directly.  It's an 8 gallon barrel, which adds logistical issues as most of my batches are 6 gallons tops and more like 5.5 by the time primary fermentation is done.  Mine was cheaper even with shipping it was only $120, but there is some cool factor to using a local companies barrel for aging.

I'm working on a recipe for putting into the barrel for aging, and think I'll start with an american strong for the first round and then a scotch heavy for the second.  This is the recipe I'm working on for the first batch, beer calculus is being strange so my process notes look wrong and I'm going to try for better than 63% efficiency this time.  The biggest troubles are I cannot figure out how to adjust the water to grist ratio when you add extract to the recipe, and it keeps resetting my boil time to 60 minutes.  I may use a different site to work out my mash schedule, my LHS says that they like Beer calculus for recipe management but avoid following their process notes.

Beer Tourism

A while ago Saveur posted this article on beer tourism to Belgium, and I wanted to cry with envy of this bastard living literally my dream of sampling the funk from the source as it where.  The US is slowly developing it's own sour beer tradition, and New Belgium brewing is putting a strong stake in that territory with their Lips of Faith series of collaborative brews marking some of the most interesting and funky generally available sour beers I know of.   Certainly one would argue there is the import section of the bottleworks places in my area for trying some strange brews, at truly they would be right, but for whatever reason the Pacific Northwest has decided that the trail to beer nirvana lies through IPA infested waters.  Round these parts hops are king, and so many of the people I talk to about beer just rave about how they're a hop head and love the IPA's.  I ask about funk brett beers, lambic's and gueuze's and I get blank stares.  Not even a Flemish Red I lament?  Open up your palette's people because this is a damn party, it doesn't need to be 190IBU of Magnum hops to be an enjoyable beer damn it!  In the heat I find IPA's oppressive, and look for pales, or better a saison for some lightness to the day.

It blows my mind that people relish funky cheese, brag about the blue cheese that smell like someone's old jock strap, but any of those notes in a beer and their raging hard on for funk wilts.  With that in mind I went looking for the Great North American Sour Brewery and found in my neck of the woods The Cascade Brewing Barrel House.  Located in Portland they have beers that move with the seasons, and they aren't afraid to get funky.  The beers link opens the "Beer Menu" and right now they are pouring 8 sour beers, but a short 4 hours away from me.  I bide my time, and read the Mad Fermentationist for moral support while my sours work on maturing.

Right now I have a 8ish month old Sour Raspberry Pale ale on Wyeasts Lambic Blend, a 1 year old Vanilla Bourbon Strong Porter that has been on Wyeast's Brett Blend for the last 3 months, and the Second runnings of my Oatmeal Stout sitting on The same Brett Blend for the last 3 months.  I broke out a 16oz of the Sour Raspberry for Seafair this year and it was so perfect for the summer, light and bubbly enough you would think it was champagne, with a light funk bite and crisp.  This is the hallmark of excellent sour beers, the funk doesn't linger.  It's the tiniest hint, the impression of that flavor and it's gone as soon as you swallow it; leaving your palette begging for more.

Beer stuff

Oh the many and varied crazy tidbits of beer things that I've got going on.  For some reason I've got micro-batch fever, and am cooking two 1 gallon batches and two 1/2 gallon batches of various bits of beer.

First up is the rehashing of my failure of a vanilla bourbon robust porter, for those that have been following for a long time and forgotten or if you're new here you can read the whole sordid affair over here in 1, 2, 3 easy steps.  Short version for the TL;DR crowd I fucked up a big beer that cost quite a bit of money.  I've let it sit in bottles for the last year (I'm surprised it was a year ago as well!) and while cleaning up my basement I decided it was time to do something with this huge (10%ABV) but largely undrinkable beer.  I poured out enough to get a gallon (with some head space) and racked some of the pale sour ale that is sitting on a lambic blend for a few days.  The FG on this beer was 1.026 so there was still a ton of sugar for those little yeasties to work on, but thus far I find the labmic blend to be giving me a very vinegary flavor profile.  I found a New Belgium LOF Bretta Beer that I had intended to pour the dregs of into this gallon of beer, turns out they are choosing to pasteurize the beer to make it more consistent (which likely killed the yeast making it not a good idea to re-pitch).  Plan b, that has thus far turned out to be an amazing choice was Wyeast's Brettanomyces.  I'm going to call this super Brett given the already high attenuation and how hard this thing is still fermenting 5 days later.  I love watching the tiny bubbles trickle up the sides of this fermentation vessel, and slightly excited about this beer.  I think the soured version is going to hide a lot of the flaws I found in this beer.  Below is a picture of me degassing the beer after I'd poured it into the gallon jug.

Up next I brewed a microbatch of an Oatmeal stout (I'm thinking ahead for the fall) the Recipe was pretty simple and just Brew in a bag style so easy to replicate and scale up if you're interested.  I bumped the OG with 1lb of dark dried malt extract, coming in at a respectable 8%abv.  Since I racked to secondary on some vanilla beans it's been needing to be agitated every few hours, but the fermentation thus far isn't "stuck" so I'm hoping it will fully attenuate without me having to build up another yeast colony for repitching.

And last but certainly not least I did a soured lite version of the Oatmeal Stout.  I don't have a recipe for the sour versions of beers typically because it's the same as whatever I did for the full strength version just reusing the grains.  By the math I did I was only about 55% efficent on my grains for the heavy batch so there was plenty of sugar left over to do a small batch with the grains and fresh oatmeal.  I cannot seem to find my notes on what the OG for the small batch was, may not matter it got blended with the rest of my Labmic blend that was sitting on a pale ale, but I thought it was north of 1.014.  I bumped it a little bit with 1/4 cup white sugar and 1 tablespoon of molasses, I don't know what it would have ended up as that way so whatever!  After 8 days I also poured a little bit of the wyeast super brett in here to really get the sour party working.

Damn it I forgot to post about international beer day again

Alright I know you've been waiting for it all year, but Happy International Beer Day!

Like International Beer Day?

I did manage to get an Oatmeal stout brewed the 28th, so you know only 3 weeks and a days late.  I need to check on it probably today or tomorrow for racking into secondary.  I have some liquid Bret yeast waiting for me at my LHB store so I'll get down there and get another vessel for racking into.  The trouble with all of these darn vessels is you find yourself thinking well I hate to leave it empty so you end up without one empty to pivot into.

Anyhow, my Tiny Quaker Stout should come in around 8%ABV, and I'm almost certain I'm going to be sad I only made a gallon of it.  The tiny batches are crazy easy to work with, and I was able to do the whole thing on my stove top.  I realize this will surprise no one, but I also did a "leftovers" batch with my spent grain and ended up with a tiny batch of weak stout that I blended with the Lambic yeast culture I keep running in a growler so that the Lambic would have something new to start working on.  It's been on the pale since about February so I figured it needed something new to work on. 

As a final note I visited Fall Fest at Schwitzer this year and had Alaskan Raspberry Wheat Ale, at 6.5%ABV it wasn't too light and was like sunshine in your mouth.  Sadly it's only available in a few states, but probably the best beer I've had all summer.

Back in the brew saddle

So on Saturday I got a brew in, I've only got wonky stuff on tap and I needed something to just drink when I'm in the mood for a beer.  I brewed up a British pale ale my LHB store had in their recipe bin.  They called it Docksider Pale ale, if I hit 75% efficiency it will be around 4.7% abv, I don't know as I couldn't be bothered to measure, but I tried a few different things so here's hoping I can hit 75%.  Low alcohol beers (3-4%) are called Session beers, so if I hit my more normal 50% efficiency then it will be a session beer.  I'm dry hopping with Fuggle and Golding hops and just going to drop this in the keg and not fuck about with bottles.

It was the first time I've brewed out back so it was a bit of an adventure for me.  I really need a tent or cover to keep tree debris from falling into the brew kettle, but other than that it was nice to not hang out in the garage for 4 or so hours.

B is for Beer

You didn't think this could slip by right?

So over the weekend we celebrated my birthday (a touch late but who's counting anyway).  I had people over and was going to make Cougar gold Mac and Cheese.  If you don't know what Cougar Gold is, you're probably not from Washington State and never heard of WSU (the cougars).  They are the butt of most Jokes in Seattle (see Ryan Leaf), with the phrase "don't coug it" a colloquialism for don't screw up.  Thing is the school also runs a creamery, and they make damn fine cheese, like $30 for a can of it (it's weird, but they sell it in cans whatever it's change your life cheese).  So I had joked about making Lobster Mac n Cheese, but at 3 for the damn cheese and another $12 for the gruyere it was already getting to be spendy Mac n Cheese.  Well I went to the store to get the gruyere and they had fresh from the sound lobster for $10.99/lb cooked.  So yeah I bought a sea bug and made $70 mac and cheese for 7 people.  Why do I tell that story to get to the beer part of this story?  So I decided to spring for myself a $12 bottle of 22ozs of chocolate gold.  Full Sail Bourbon Barrel aged Imperial Porter, 9.5%abv of roasty perfection.  If you see this beer in your local store I know $12 seems steep for a 22oz, and it is but I vouch for the experience.  Don't just take my word for it, check it out on ratebeer.

Bottom line no apologies, this is the best beer I have payed someone else to make for me ever.

CNC Update of sorts

So all of the parts I mentioned in this post have arrived and this weekend my Father (woodworker extraordinaire) is going to be in town so I think rather than jump into my latest time sink/money waster ie CigarBox guitar, or Charcuterie.  For the curious or deranged, you can see a tiny window into my clusterfuck of a brain over at my Beer Links Page.

I need to make sure I can locate all the pieces, but it may finally be time to fire up this tiny CNC Router and get it working.  This post from a dude that had no electronics background that just whipped up a CNC router may have been some of the genesis for getting off my ass and completing this project.

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.

Barrel aging beer

*Le sigh, I think I'm in love.

Sour Raspberry Ale

So the tiny side experiment I spoke of here just got bottled.  You hear that V, one down!

I really need to work on my thought process for these types of things in the future.  I had 1/2 a gallon of sour and 1/2 a gallon of raspberry ale, so it's going to be fairly sour and took the ale's abv% from 8.8% down to 6% and I'm very concerned about the carbonation levels.  I left the sour sitting in the carboy with a cap on for 3 or so days and it was all I could do to loosen the cap, and when I did get it loose the beer exploded out!  I left double the normal headroom, and only used swingtop bottles so that will hopefully help contain the pressure, but the blend needs to be like 25% or so.  I will give until Sunday to carbonate up and then I'm going to put in in the fridge at very low temps to try and crash the yeast out and keep it from going too crazy.  As it is, I got too much oxygen in there so the yeast is going to come back with a vengence and a blended final gravity of 1.008 there is still a decent amount of sugar for that Lambic blend to work on.

The taste was really nice at blending, but once the other flavors get a chance to work on this in the bottle it isn't going to be nearly as balanced as it was right now.  The funk was there, but muted and the raspberry was very prominent in the flavor the color was a creamy red, and really nice to look at.  I'm glad that I didn't figure out hop utilization beforehand and the ale ended up as bitter as it was given that I blended with an unhopped sour.  In the future, I will definitely dry hop the small sours just to give it some aromatic qualities.  And my final though goes out to the Mad Fermentationist, I have to disagree on the smackpacks not being enough.  I fermented a 1.040 unboild wort with just six drops the liquid Wyeast Belgian Lambic Blend (3278) aka the dregs from my Sour for blending and it took it down int he 1.005 FG range in less than optimal conditions (ie I fermented in a growler with no airlock with the second wash of grains that stayed in my cooler overnight)

P.S. might be handy for others too, but I needed a weighted average calculator for figuring out my blended abv%.  This one did the trick