What's Brewing & Doing - November edition

Started out by transferring a dark mild to the keg while not under pressure. The horror.



Now I'm waiting for my barleywine to come to a boil. Hit all my numbers so far somehow, which is a pleasant surprise.



What a god damn mess this is going to be to clean



Happy November folks!

 

As an outdoor brewer, November is typically a panic based brewing month for me. I'll probably brew 3-5 times this month just in case the weather doesn't cooperate Dec-Feb. Last year, I only missed one brewing month.

Next beer is a Mounds Bar Stout minus the Mounds bars. It will be brewed this week.

 

Working on a schwarzbier right now. Pils, Vienna, and debittered malt. Hallertau hops at 60 and 15.

 

I'm mid-boil with another Conan IPA. This one is earmarked for an office holiday party in December. Using a hops spider I built from the guide on a BYO article.

I wanted to use London III, even have a starter ready to go, but this Conan was harvested from a can of Heady Topper that a colleague got me, and that's a better conversation piece for the office.

 

Just threw the dry hops in my grapefruit IPA - Cascade, Citra and Zythos. Going to add the grapefruit zest in a few days.

 

5 gal of German Pils with 34/70 and homegrown Mt. Hood hops...just waiting for some cool weather around the corner : )

 

maxed out my 65 quart YETI cooler (mash tun) today by brewing an imperial blonde that came in at 1.087 (before the honey addition). total grain bill for a 10 gallon batch was 34.5 pounds of total madness! 3 gallons will be sacrificed for an experiment to receive some cinnamon, vanilla beans and some cocoa nibs. completely pleased with a long day of brewing.

 

i almost had a boil over myself, today. had to keep shutting off the flame to get passed the hot break.

 

Happy November, today I made the th3 ultra light IPA/pale and a shamle pale ale. Got anew sack of otter Maris coming which means RIS. On Thursday. Brew on

 

Tonight I'm going to rack split 5 gallons of lambic in halves and rack onto 6 pounds of mangoes, and 6 pounds of peach puree. Will be ordering some passionfruit puree and kumquat puree tonight to split another 5 gallon batch in halves onto those later this week.

This week I plan on brewing my boozy sour quad. Picked up 2 pounds of raisins, half pound of figs, and 6 pounds of tart cherries to rack it on to after I ferment it down with some abbey ale yeast.

 

Getting ready to cold crash, and then keg for my first time this coming weekend - a centennial ipa.

This is probably my last batch for 2015, sadly. So much beer stocked in my closet, I've gotta start drinking them. It's getting a little out of hand.

 

Brewed up a Barley wine Sunday. O.G. 1.097. Happily bubbling and smelling nice!

 

So my source for passionfruit and kumquat puree fell through; guess I'll just wait until I can get them fresh and puree them myself. No hurry really since I'm dealing with lambics here.

Thinking of brewing another batch of None More Black towards the end of the month. I have some tweaks I want to do to the base beer and am thinking of 'double barreling' this batch. Bourbon soaked light toast french oak for round one, and heavy toast rye whiskey oak for round two. Maybe split in two and add raspberries to the other half (this variant is always a huge hit at Darkness Day). Decisions...

Here's a pic of the lambic I split in half and racked onto mangoes and peaches, respectively. The color difference surprised me (base lambic is similar to the peach on the right).

 

Do an Amazon search for Dafruta. They make passionfruit concentrate and more.

 

Thanks for the reminder about concentrates!

 

I bottled my 13% Imperial Stout last night. It sat in a secondary for about 6 weeks on some medium toast french oak chips, cocoa nibs, vanilla beans and maple toasted coconut, all of which had been soaked in Maker's Mark for a couple of weeks prior to adding it to the secondary.

I figure i'll probably give it about a month or so in the bottles before i pop one open to try it.

 

Got a busy weekend planned. Triple karmaleit clone getting brewed up Sunday followed by an evening of bottling up my yearly imperial stout. Probably gonna spike a few bottles with espresso tincture for fun.

 

Any experience bottling with these? Looks like they have some preservatives in them. I might pick up some of the guava and/or passionfruit to add to an american wheat next year. I'll be kegging, so my question is merely out of curiosity.

 

I haven't used them. I saw them the other day while looking for something and bookmarked it for future use. I have used dried fruit and fruit juice with various preservatives and the beer had no problem fermenting it.