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| By Karl Rasche on Dec 6th 2004, 12:27 am | Permalink |
| Originally set out to make an oktoberfest today. However, I guess things decided to work better than usual, and I ended up with better than 85% eff and with 20 extra points of OG. So, if you go by style, maybe I should just call it a bock... | |
| By Karl Rasche on Nov 7th 2004, 5:17 pm | Permalink |
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Brewed a barleywine with some rye. But, efficency ended up much better than I was expecting, so my OG was a bit over the top (1.120). Its blowing off tons of crud still, so at least something will happen. My luck it'll just get stuck in super-sweet land. Also made a garbage pale ale from the leftovers. Due to some poor planning and a lack of iphodor, the only yeast I had laying around for this was an american hef (which, seemed better than the other choice, which was a wit yeast in the back of the fridge). Hopefully at least _something_ will end up drinkable. Racked a pair of meads; One was way to dry and fusely - I've learned my lesson about warm weather brewing! |
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| By Karl Rasche on Oct 24th 2004, 4:57 pm | Permalink |
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Bottled 2 gallons of cider that had been sitting around forever.. Tried to sweeten it up with lactose, as it was supposed to be for the sweet cider loving crowd. Unfortunatly, I didn't quite have enough on hand, so its probably not quite the sweetness I was shooting for but hey... Snapped the top part of my racking cane off in the process.. doh! I think its mostly salvagable as I want to rack 5 gal of mead onto some cranberries, but no LHBS on sundays.. The beer gods laugh at me this weekend.. |
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| By Karl Rasche on Oct 8th 2004, 9:29 pm | Permalink |
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Tried my hand at a small batch of wheatwine the other day. Slowest. Sparge. Ever... OG was about 1.090 with a wonderous efficency of about 60%.. A rough guess at the IBUs is around 80, one of my bittering additions had been sitting in the freezer for an indefiniate period of time, but it at least had some scent left to it. Fed it some WLP 320, as it was on hand. Woo-whee. What a powerful fement. The blow-out hose got clogged sometime last nigth and spewed forth a fair fraction of the batch (it was a gallon) all over the cooler it was living in. Oh well, such is life. I guess it'll be a _real_ small batch now.. |
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| By Karl Rasche on Sep 6th 2004, 2:26 pm | Permalink |
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Found a new LHBS on saturday.. It isn't exactly new (they've been open since last november) or local (about an hour drive), but they seemed to be pretty well stocked and knowledgable of brewing. Its basically just a pile of supplies in a corner of some light industrial space that serves as a local micro (no pub, just tanks). But hey, they stock rye, do keg conversions, sell cornies, and have samples of their latest creations (upcoming oktoberfest).. Probably par for your average LHBS, but pretty rare around here.. Still too hot to brew much.. but its getting cooler, so hopefully one of these days... |
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