Brewing Randomness

Life has pretty much sucked brewing-wise over the last month.  Work has been crazy and just sucked up a ton of my time.  So over the last month I have been able to randomly get stuff done when time and energy allowed. To kick things off, I managed to keg all 3 beers that were waiting in the fermenters.  This included my ESB, red ale, and the barleywine that has been aging on bourbon soaked oak chips.  The ESB and red ale both taste as they should.   The barleywine smells amazing, but still lacks in the taste department.  I am going to bottle it up (with my awesome new BeerGun) and see how it ages.  I also worked on a new beer marking system, but that will be a post for another day.

I also got work done on my brewery control panel.  I am in the process of cleaning up the box and door so I can paint them!  Then it will be on to the fun part of wiring everything.  That will be a pain, but if I take my time I should do alright.  The painting will take a week or so to let everything dry properly, but then I will be back up and running at full speed.

At the National Homebrew Conference in June, I will be taking the Beer Judge Certification Program exam to become an official homebrew judge.  The test will be difficult, but hopefully I can do well enough to pass.  I started watching some online recordings and following along with the tastings to help develop my palate.  I will have more on this later.

I also brewed my last beer ever.  Well at least my last beer on my current set up.  I have decided to focus what is normally my brew time on the brew system to try to make that operational before some friends visit in June so we can brew together on it.  My last beer was a Rogue Dead Guy Ale "clone" that I am calling Not Dead Guy Ale for a friend coming back from deployment.  The name also works on the level that I was forced to sub out some of the grain due to local availability.  The brew day went well.  This was the first time I have ever done a 90 minute boil, but thanks to Beersmith I mashed and boiled with the correct volumes of water to end up with my 5 gallons.  This beer is currently bubbling away in the fermenter.

I feel bad after not posting for the entire month of April, but life just got in the way.  It especially hurts after starting the year so well with regards to posting about my brewing.  Looking ahead, my work schedule seems to be calming down so I will hopefully have more time to play with brewing stuff and post about it.

Kegging Day

Ready to be cleaned!

Today was one of the less fun brewing days. I cleaned three kegs and filled two. On the bright side, this means that I have two more beers that will be ready to drink soon. I kegged the Vanilla Stout and the Pink Death Pale. The Vanilla Stout is a recipe that I have close to perfected. I am now dialing in the right amount of vanilla to add. The last iteration had a little too much due to some clumsiness and me spilling some extra vanilla extract into the keg. This time I added the intended amount and hopefully it will be what we are looking for.

The Pink Death Pale is an original recipe of mine. It is a pale ale made with a bit of rye. It is hopped with all Cascade hops. It needs some tweaking, but it definitely has potential. The name comes from the fact that I was doing a 2.5 gallon batch using my 10 gallon cooler mash tun. I was worried about temp loss with so much headspace and so I made an artificial top for the mash tun out of pink foam board insulation. I cut it to size, covered it in foil and set it on top of the mash. The name serves warning to anyone who drinks it that I may be killing them slowly with each pint (even though the foil kept the mash from touching the insulation).