Apple trees for cider

In November of last year my wife and I bought a house. Prior to that we owned a Town-home with a zero lot line, so I never really got to start my garden or the various hippy ideas that floated in my head. The new home is on .38 acre, which isn't huge by any stretch, but will let me have a garden and plant some fruit trees. I've been shopping for heirloom varieties for cider making and have a few that seem interesting.

I found a site called Trees of Antiquity that specializes in heirloom varieties that will ship trees ready to plant.

First is the Manchurian Crab. I'm particularly interested in a crab variety that works well in my cooler summers and has a somewhat early harvest, that will also act as a pollinator for an eating or dessert apple tree that I would like to plant.

The second apple tree that is interesting is a Cox's Orange Pippin. It's supposed to be quite tasty and it appears to be compatible with the crab apple for bloom time and fertility, so they should do a good job of helping to keep each other pollinated. I also read that the Cox tree is good for espalier which could be useful to give me a little bit of a privacy screen between my home and the neighbors.  Previous owners of this house cut down some privacy bushes that were on the fence line so a tree that could do double duty of fruit and privacy seems like a win.

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.

True Blood and junk

So many things I don't even know where to begin.

I've started on a rhubarb wine, that will take something like 2 months to finish up and is the reason that I'm going to buy another couple of carboys. It takes 20 lbs of rhubarb to make 5 gallons of the stuff, but I think it's going to be above average awesome.

The specific recipe and directions can be found in this PDF. I added about 6oz of thistle honey to it, and found that 10lbs of corn sugar only had me at 17 or 18 balling which is ~1.080OG so get 12 or even 13 lbs of corn sugar if you follow this recipe.

Next up, True Blood started and I still haven't finished watching last season. I think I have 3 episodes left and cannot find time for that, not to mention I'd like to watch the Game of Thrones season if I could get the time.

Oh sleep you cruel mistress.

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.

shovel/funnel out of a jug

There is no point to this really, but the open handle makes me think that it would be really useful to scoop and funnel grain into small containers.  I keep coming back to this image going that would be useful for beer or feeding chickens or ... really not much at all.

Make via Lifehacker

I apologize ahead of time, I have a lot of links in my drafts I'm trying to find the bottom of the rabbit hole.

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).

The crud, and other crust

It's stunning how quick and slow things seem to go.  Nothing really to report on any front, I've been wrapping up this and that but mostly moving chairs around on the titanic.  I bottled the side batch of the American Strong, that is really just a pale ale,  I've made arrangements for a guest brewer to host a beer in my barrel, secured enough bottles to get the full batch of the American strong bottled (though I'm going to need more caps and other bits), cleaned up the beer storage area where one of my containers of Starsan leaked nearly a gallon of water inside of a cabinet.  Unplugged my kegorator and am working on a rust and moisture problem that you get from running a chest freezer as a fridge.  Dug out the Navel Jelly to address said rust problem just waiting for the last of the moisture to dry up before I attack the rust and them seal up the seam that's letting water leak.  Finished up my rocket Stove and the stand for placing things above the stove, I just need to run a test burn to verify that the airflow is good and see how well my pots fit on my stand.

Otherwise, I'm getting over some cold thing and getting back into the gym.  It's my first full week back at lifting so I'm sore and hungry and cranky.  In short yeah, just living.


I'll leave you with this gem from Modest Mouse, Heart cooks brain. The years go fast and the days go slow.

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

Progress and such

I'm about halfway finished reading Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy[?] which was always the next book on my list after Rise of the Meritocracy. It is so well written. It flows like a running narrative, but woven in there is a critique of America building to a final point. I hope that he has some excellent recommendations for alternative models, but the picture he's painting is spot on and has a great eye for history.

If you've read Rise of the Meritocracy and think that Young's warning should be payed warning, Twilight of the Elites is Christopher Hayes ringing the alarm bells and shouting.  Even if you're not an American, it's a pretty fascinating look inside of the body politic of America and how we came to feel like a bloated and rotting corpse in just 236 or so years.

In unrelated news I'm gonna get my beer brewing on this weekend, so I can get something in that beautiful and sadly empty oak barrel!  It will remain sadly empty for about 2 more weeks while the beer finishes fermenting to be ready for the barrel.  The style is going to be American Strong and the hops I plan on using are Cascade but that is about all I've managed to make my mind up on.  I'm waffling back and forth about using extract and sugar to bump the OG up, or just tough it out and try for higher efficiencies with the all grain.

I also started a batch of sauerkraut 2 days ago, that should be ready to eat in a few more days.  It's a pretty simple recipe and pretty traditional, but I needed to do something for the fall.  If I'm still feeling frisky I've got my sourdough that needs some attention this weekend.  In all it will be a busy long weekend!

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.

Right Habits

Success is an interesting thing, easy to see when you're there but harder to see in process.  I waited out the olympics to post this link to the Lifehacker post on right habits.  I'll be the first to say, this struck me because I'm a swimmer, and I have some concept of what an amazing feat Phelp's first olympics was.  If you watched it, you know.  It was electric to watch him swim, there was something going on there.  I've attended swim camps, and have seen some of the techniques in the article generally applied.  Never with the success of Michael Phelps obviously, but the article is really worth your time.

For those not making the jump to the article, the thrust of it is success is a habit.  You cultivate it by creating routines that lead you to success and the the author covers a few that worked for Michael Phelps.  Small wins, create platforms and establish a culture where winning is contagious.  I think the small wins section is the easiest to wrap your arms around, and basically is about doing things that make you feel successful, leads you to do things successfully.  For athletes this is simple, most have a warm up routine and many have "race music" to help amp them up, applying this outside of athletics is a more interesting thought exercise.  For instance let's examine what I would call a successful brew day.

It starts several days in advance for me, researching a recipe and reviewing my brew processes.  I recall what I did the last time that I felt worked well, and think about the things I wasn't as pleased by to try and improve on.  Next comes having everything you will need on hand like grains, hops, yeast and any additives. I need my equipment sanitized, and clean.  I need enough purified water and my enough propane in my tank, but mostly I need to have enough time.  Invariably it takes me about 5 or so hours start to finish to get a beer done and in the fermenter, this includes the "second runnings" batch I've gotten in the habit of doing on my all grain beers.

Anyhow what did you think of the article?

Trying to not hyperventillate

So yeah, I just bought a 5 gallon oak barrel for beer.  I've been looking at it for the last month, and finally pulled the trigger.

Isn't she a beauty?  For those that might be interested in such a crazy thing they can be purchased here for $89+shipping.  I didn't want to post anything here before I got a chance to buy one, but oh my goodness I excited and scared.  I just put myself on the hook to always have a beer in it for the foreseeable forever, because the barrel can never be dry (or you risk infection).  I'm going to have to keep it filled with only non-soured beers so that I can tap "guest" brewers to help keep it full.

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.

Bottling and such

Not a ton to report today, I'm sort of on an off day for me traveling this weekend.  I have the hardest time getting back into the flow of things after a travel weekend, and I've had a lot of them the last 2 months.

Before I got on the road I managed to get my Tiny Oatmeal Stout into the bottles.  The airlock had come to basically a full stop, and I was (pleasantly) surprised that the beer had fully attenuated.  I was nervous that I had gotten a suck fermentation when I racked to secondary, but it turns out I may have just been ready to bottle at 9 days.  I racked onto some vanilla beans that I had laying around since the vanilla bourbon porter, and it was then that it appeared to come full stop.  The experience and some other beer news I've been watching has more or less set my path that I'm going to need to get a march pump.  I've hemmed and hawed over it long enough, the piece of equipment I want next is that.  Strangely enough I just entered into a phase where I won't be drinking at all for the next little bit as I work on keeping my total calories a day under what I normally do.  It should be a rather interesting next couple of weeks.

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.