My troubles with brewing dark beers continue. I thought that I had licked it after a few nice brown to very dark brown beers, but I just tasted the Irish stout (almost as black as my shriveled heart) I have in the fermenter right now and it is not good.

( Ramblings and labels... )

Monday was a week since I was laid off, so it was time to get serious about the job hunt.  Nora and myself used a shared Google document to work on my resume - a former colleague and his wife helped as well.  At one point there were 4 of us all editing the same document (oh brave new world).  Once we were happy with it, I applied for two jobs - one ( Read more... )

On Friday evening I bottled the American Pale Ale after cold-crashing it in a cooler and ice-water for a couple of days.  The beer was nice and clear and it tasted good.  Since I had sanitizer knocking around, I took a sample from the Saison to see how it was coming along.  It's not done - it's at about 1.016.  I moved it upstairs to raise the ( Read more... )

Saturday was social day.  Our friends Doug and Stacy came up for a lovely afternoon of sitting in the garden drinking beer, eating grilled food and conversing about the important issues of the day (I would report some of our conversations verbatim, but I'm afraid the high level of discourse would go straight over your heads, particularly the thorny ( Read more... )

Had a nice relaxing weekend with
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Serious beer geeks can often be found extolling the virtues of beers that are bottle conditioned, that is where refermentation takes place in the bottle in order to produce carbonation - a small amount of yeast and some additional fermentables are added before bottling to allow this process to take place.  The alternative is to force carbonate beer ( Read more... )

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It's almost time to try the summer bitter that I recently bottled - I'll wait until Sunday when 
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On Friday afternoon, I took some time to bottle the Summer Bitter that I brewed a couple of weeks ago.  The yield was pretty good - a full 3.5 gallons which translated to 16 assorted English bottles (Sam Smiths, Fuller's, Youngs, Etc.), 4 half liter swingtops and 4 12oz bottles.  I used StarSan as a sanitizer for the first time.  I liked it.  It ( Read more... )

While  
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