Long day of beer

So yesterday was a long day of brewing, but I do have pictures of some of the process and am working on that post.  The beer on deck was the Yellow Diamond Belgian Pale Ale taken from the book Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass.  I enjoy this book just because it is a mix of history and nuts and bolts recipe and procedure book, it reads a little like a novel with recipes and folklore.  It is a great second beer book, for those that have already read The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, or How to Brew, and are looking for some interesting stories and information on how styles of beer came to be, or just want some interesting recipes.

After figuring out that I may have lost some of my notes I decided that I needed to get serious about keeping track of the whole beer experience and gave the commercial software another look.  I still thought beer tools was more tedious than I wanted to use, and I as not impressed with Pro Mash, and the spreadsheet based tools where a non-starter for me.  I remembered hearing about a site called Beer Calculus from one of the guys at the LBS, and I have to say that the process was not a pain in the ass, and it is a web based tool so I don't have to install any software (really a bonus for me).  I think I am going to give this a try for the next few beers, and so far the only gripe that I have is some of the rather imprecise measurements that are offered.  I measure my OG with 4 decimal points and the hopville only allows 3 in their drop down.  Not a huge deal, but because I am a little lazy and don't wait for my beer to hit temps before I measure I use the conversion chart that ends up with 4 decimal points.

The brew day was seriously long though so I am beat, I started at 1pm and washed the last pot at about 9:30pm.  Despite a veritable cornucopia of tragedy I managed to make a beer and get the yest pitched so I think everything will turn out fine.

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