Beer update!
Well, many a moon has passed since last I updated, but a good summary of the intervening months can be provided by an update of the brewing progress....
We just finished our eleventh batch today! Our batches are clocking in at a pretty reliable 10 gallons, give or take a half-gallon, as we've dialed in the process pretty well. Our total output thus far is about 90 gallons! In early October we had an oktoberfest party with home-brewed beer featured, which was a blast, but since we polished off much of what we had at the time it left us hurting for beer. Since then we just bottled an IPA ("Kid Icarus", because like the character from the video game it has mad hops), and a winter beer just got transferred to secondary. Our 10-gallon batches normally top out at around 6.5% alcohol by volume, as the mash-tun cooler can't hold much more grain than needed for that; however, for the winter beer we upped the gravity by adding 4 lbs of brown sugar during the boil - hard to say exactly but that should put it somewhere in the 7.5 - 8.5% range, unless the yeast gives up on us before then.
Today we brewed our second attempt at a Porter, "Kid Orpheus" - I like the feel of the "Kid + figure from greek myth" nomenclature, and Kid Orpheus makes a suitable foil to Kid Icarus, the porter being darker and murkier, the IPA being amber colored and full of chutzpah. (Another way to look at this is that I prefer IPAs and my ladyfriend, who's temper can veer towards the darker and moodier end of the scale, is a fan of porters). Also, for the brew nerds reading this, we put the wort straight onto the yeast from our previous batch in the primary fermenter, which saves you a bunch of prep for yeast starters and sanitation steps. It seems to be burbling happily along, so hopefully there was no grotesque mutation of the previous yeast that will doom the porter to tasting funny. We'll see how that goes.
I kind of want to try a lager next, since I find myself wanting something a little lighter than an odd liter of 6.5% beer. This will have to wait for the basement to cool down for the winter as we can't really control the temperature of any fermentation spots, and we don't have a cave handy.
We just finished our eleventh batch today! Our batches are clocking in at a pretty reliable 10 gallons, give or take a half-gallon, as we've dialed in the process pretty well. Our total output thus far is about 90 gallons! In early October we had an oktoberfest party with home-brewed beer featured, which was a blast, but since we polished off much of what we had at the time it left us hurting for beer. Since then we just bottled an IPA ("Kid Icarus", because like the character from the video game it has mad hops), and a winter beer just got transferred to secondary. Our 10-gallon batches normally top out at around 6.5% alcohol by volume, as the mash-tun cooler can't hold much more grain than needed for that; however, for the winter beer we upped the gravity by adding 4 lbs of brown sugar during the boil - hard to say exactly but that should put it somewhere in the 7.5 - 8.5% range, unless the yeast gives up on us before then.
Today we brewed our second attempt at a Porter, "Kid Orpheus" - I like the feel of the "Kid + figure from greek myth" nomenclature, and Kid Orpheus makes a suitable foil to Kid Icarus, the porter being darker and murkier, the IPA being amber colored and full of chutzpah. (Another way to look at this is that I prefer IPAs and my ladyfriend, who's temper can veer towards the darker and moodier end of the scale, is a fan of porters). Also, for the brew nerds reading this, we put the wort straight onto the yeast from our previous batch in the primary fermenter, which saves you a bunch of prep for yeast starters and sanitation steps. It seems to be burbling happily along, so hopefully there was no grotesque mutation of the previous yeast that will doom the porter to tasting funny. We'll see how that goes.
I kind of want to try a lager next, since I find myself wanting something a little lighter than an odd liter of 6.5% beer. This will have to wait for the basement to cool down for the winter as we can't really control the temperature of any fermentation spots, and we don't have a cave handy.