Category: Projects and Thoughts

A lot of people hate bottling, I don’t hate it, but it’s not something I enjoy. The actual bottling expierence itself isn’t too bad, and it’s not much more time consuming than kegging. There are extra steps, and you have yeast sentiment at the bottom of your bottle conditioned beer. You also have the additional time from grain to glass. The part I hate the most time is getting bottles clean and ready for bottling. I don’t buy them new, I give away a most of the beer I do bottle, so I have to wash, relabel and reuse commercial beer bottles. I try to do this when I’m drinking, but I still need to take some additional time to scrub before they are ready. It takes a lot of time for me, and I’ve said before time is not something I have a lot of.

This is part two of the homebrewing roundtable covering a series of beginning brewing topics designed to help would be brewers break the ice, and get brewing. It’s a chance to hear some advice from folks with experience, and nothing at stake in the gear you purchase, or the method you chose to brew. I’ve asked home brewers of all experience levels across north america if they had advice for those that want to start brewing but hasn’t. I also asked about what their first brewing setup was, and if they have any of it still. The idea is to give a potential brewer enough advice to be able to take the plunge. As well as provide some info on gear/setups that might be worth buying once right.

This series of posts will be different than all the others posted so far. This is a roundtable of homebrewers. I’ve asked them some questions about how they got started, and to provide some recommendations on getting started, and about some mistakes the’ve made along the way. They are from all experience levels, both coasts, and even from our neighbor up north. One thing we all have in common is we are all homebrewers, and we all had to start somewhere. This series of questions is designed to help would be brewers break the ice, and get brewing. It’s good to hear how we got started, the gear, recipes, tips, and of course the mistakes we have made. I plan be doing these as an on going series of conversations about topics useful to have a breadth of perspectives on. I’ll start part 1 of the Q&A with an introduction to the participants and how they got started brewing.

Home brewing is a hobby you can start with a small investment in equipment ($150 or less) and make beer. At that point the biggest investment is the per batch cost. When brewing extract patches the fixed costs cost to brew are low, but the per batch cost is much higher.

It’s my season for saisons. Having brewed my first in mid march, I wanted to make another attempt since I had harvested the wyeast french saison (3711) from the first.. My plan was to brew something similar to to the Mad Fermentationist’s rye saison with brett. It’s a simple grain and hop bill, and leverages a long secondary w/ brett. I plan on deviating from Mike’s recipe a bit, first I added 1/2 lb of acid malt to improve my mash ph. Such a light grain bill, can result in a much higher ph which can slow enzymatic action in your mash. My other changes were to using Styrian Aurora, instead of Styrian Goldings, 3711 as primary yeast, and using the dregs of Oak Senex Torva for an extended secondary on some toasted oak. I do still need to source the oak (mike?). My goal is to have a funky beer to celebrate my third anniversary brewing, hopefully it will be something special.

Your browser does not support the video tag Only a year after…

I’ve done some spring redecorating around here. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve added a new section to the site, Brewing Gear. This is a description of my brewing setup. It’s a point of reference for my recipes, incase you are wondering what I’m brewing on, efficiencies, losses etc.

You may remember my prior update about the stir plate saga, if not ‘Stir Plate update, or how I let the smoke out of two sets of components’ is where I elaborated on my attempts to create a stir plate. You may want to review that before you read this, so you can understand my state of mind approaching this project. This project has been hanging over my head for nearly a year now when I first received the parts. There is a lot of motivation to get this completed so I can move on to other things. Topping that list, making a heady topper clone, will require a large yeast pitch to fully attenuate.

This is another ‘collaboration’ beer, a friend from BFD brews a fair number of saisons, belgians, and sours. So we’ve emailed back and forth quite a bit discussing brewing a saison together, with the idea of splitting a 10g batch. I just haven been able to to sneak away for that large of a chunk of time. Instead of splitting a batch, I decide to brew solo, and will bring the results to a club meeting. Seem familiar?
I had most of the ingredients for the recipe, but as usual I was missing a few. I had to swap out candy sugar for some wild flower honey. The major diversion from the recipe is the aroma hop, the recipe called for dose of the noble hop Saaz. I swapped it out for bullion which is anything but noble. On an amusing note (to me at least) this is the first recipe I’ve come across with both Saaz and Citra, which are names of our two cats. Since I was missing Saaz, I decided to name it missing cat saison. So maybe next time I’ll stick to the recipe and call it two cat saison.

This is my second attempt at a sweet stout, the first was a partial mash oatmeal stout, this was a small biab all grain batch designed from a recipe found on beersmithrecipes.com. I made a few changes to my recipe for scaling, in an attempt to smooth it out.