Who's Brewing? August 1-4 Edition

Sure! FYI - This was my first time adding fruit to a beer.

I added 7lbs of yellow flesh peaches (on sale @ 2$/LB) to 5 gallons of berliner. I washed, pitted and sliced the peaches into eighth's (so they would fit in carboy neck). I froze the peaches for about a week in a freezer bag. Took them out, defrosted, and slipped each slice right into the carboy. No bags or anything, just raw dogged them. They were nice and slimy from defrosting on top of one another.

Used a paint strainer when racking into the bottling bucket to avoid the very deteriorated chucks and skins. Aged on the peaches ~2 months.

 

<sigh> doing a Munich dunkel. Just realized my mash tun's, the one that has 8gal water/grain in it, false bottom is sitting on the shelf.<sigh again>

 

I just did one with 2 lbs per gallon of white peaches in secondary for about two months.

 

perfect! thx.

 

Just got cleaned and put away; Brewed a Zythos/FF/Chinook IPA and kegged a table saison ~3.7% ABV. About to put a brined pork roast on the grill...

 

Ouch! Any way you can blame this on the dog?

 

Well I bottled elderberry wheat IV yesterday. It looked, smelled, and tasted like it will come out excellent again. I was going to brew, but it was just toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo damn hot. I really need to brew because right now neither of my freezers has any fermenting beer inside. That's enough to make any grown man cry.

 

Nope. I look forward to the brew day more now that I have embraced the idea that there will be a challenge due to something I overlooked. I assume at some point everything that can go wrong will have. I no longer agonize over trying to anticipate the issue.

I went ahead and let it mash. I poured it back into the brew kettle, slid on the false bottom, and poured it back in.

 

D'oh! Can you "work it" on the sparge without the false bottom? Seems that since grains act as their own filter, all hope is not lost. How do you deal with this problem?

 

I went ahead and let it mash. I poured it back into the brew kettle, slid on the false bottom, and poured it back in.

 

Well, triple brew weekend didn't happen, but Double Brew Sunday did, and boy....what a long day.

Started at 10:30 AM with the Graham Cracker Ale, and finished finally at 10:30 PM with the Banana Cream Ale.

 

Didn't brew... but bottled my second all-grain brew instead. I decided to re-brew my first all-grain because it had turned out to be such a malt-bomb - I had grossly underestimated my system efficiency. After correcting for that, I came very close to hitting my targets and I think this is going to be GREAT! It's a session centennial blonde.. OG was 1.039 and it finished at 1.010. Lots of flavor with a mild finishing bitterness - it'll taste even better when it's fully conditioned. I'm really looking forward to serving this to friends & family at our annual Lobsterfest later this month. I'm betting it will all disappear!

Cheers!

 

How'd yours turn out? I'm anxious as hell to taste mine. The carbonation will be lower than style suggests, but I'm hoping the flavor/nose/appearance impresses friends and I.

 

I just bottled last week so I haven't had a bottle yet, but it was great a bottling. Huge peach aroma, good fruit in the taste, but the bready notes from the base still come through.

 

It's a really good thing to re-brew beers, even multiple times. I've learned a lot from doing four batches of the same basic blonde ale, and four batches of elderberry wheat. I know that the elderberry wheat is the most popular of my beers so far too! Tho both are easy to make, but I think any major inconsistencies in my brewing would probably show up with either of these beers, but more so with the blonde, as there's not a whole lot to hide behind with that one.

My first all grain brew was a malt bomb too, probably due to underestimating both hops required for balance and efficiency (well, I didn't even try to calculate efficiency for my first AG brew, lol, so don't know if that counts). Since then, I've also been using at least four ounces of hops when it's a weaker hop (like willamette, serebrianka, tettnanger etc), assuming I want at least some hops character to come through.

Session centennial blonde sounds quite tasty!