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| By Rob Hudson on Oct 2nd 2003, 4:18 am | Permalink |
Kegged half of my Brutal Bitter clone which I'm calling Bumble Bitter, since a bee fell into the wort while it was boiling. Kegged the half fermented with Danstar Nottingham. Got it down to 1.010 from 1.061. On tasting it, I detected a little bit of diacetyl so instead of chilling it right away, I'm going to leave it in the keg but at room temp for 24 hrs. Then crash chill it and start drinking. Besides the diacetyl, it had a nice flavor, strong bitterness, very fruity and nice hop aroma. This one is going to go fast.  |
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| By Rob Hudson on Sep 30th 2003, 4:36 am | Permalink |
| Updated the forum so that replies to threads you haven't seen yet are outlined in a dashed grey around the author of the reply. So you can more easily check back and read the parts you haven't read already. I know I've wanted something like that myself. If anyone finds any problems with it, or finds it annoying, let me know. Cheers! | |
| By Rob Hudson on Sep 22nd 2003, 3:46 am | Permalink |
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Made the Brutal Bitter clone from Zymurgy today. I had ordered Crystal pellet hops a little while ago in preparation for this and this weekend turned out to be nice. Pretty straight forward recipe. I made 10 gallons... 23 lbs 2-row 1 lb Crystal 40 1 lb Crystal 15 (I only could find 20L) 3.25 oz Crystal 4.5% at 90, 60, 15, and flameout. I substituted the 15 minute addition for a FWH addition. I've never used pellets with my system before and it clogged it up. I ended up using the racking cane to get the beer from the kettle. When it was empty the bottom was filled with all the dregs of the pellets. Green, gooey stuff. The recipe called for CL-50 and from what I hear they don't make it anymore. I thought I'd make an experiment out of it and tried to choose 2 other soft, rounded yeasts and picked Wyeast 1056 and Danstar Nottingham. The Danstar is a dry yeast, which I've never tried before. It's a lot cheaper than the Wyeast tube. It'll be fun to see if there is any flavor profile difference. Also used my carbon filter from morebeer. It has a hose attachment and worked real well. The flow wasn't slow as I might have feared, but kept up with the water supply pretty well. Hopefully that'll normalize any chlorine spikes in my water. Other than getting 60% efficiency, the brew day went well. |
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| By Rob Hudson on Sep 12th 2003, 6:08 pm | Permalink |
Added a news feed from Realbeer.com. It updates once a day and is under the Bodensatz news feed. Technical stuff: Realbeer doesn't have a nice RDF/RSS file for their news feed like Bodensatz did so I wrote a Python script to scrape the site to grab their news.  |
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| By Rob Hudson on Sep 8th 2003, 11:39 pm | Permalink |
I left Hop Madness with a few grocery sized plastic bags of Mt Hood and Nugget hops. They still had quite a bit of water content so I took what I learned at the hop facility plant and dried them in the garage. I took my wife's Sweater dryer screen thingy, put if over a big blue tub that I dunk my carboys in during fermentation, and put a small space heater in the bucket underneath the screen. I dumped the bag o' hops on the screen and let the warm air come up through the hops. In a few hours they were dry and ready for bagging and freezer storage.  Now I just need to find something to do with that many Mt Hood hops. Supposedly similar to the Hallertau -- maybe I'll save them for an attempt at a pilsner or light lager. |
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