Brewing Activities (2020)

Bottled my ESB this morning - went rather smoothly!

I also did a home water test since I thought my water might be acidic and causing my beers to be too dark. Turns out my water PH is closer to 8.5... How do I fix that or do I need to go bottled now?

 

The pH of water for mashing isn't really important. The reason it's not important is that water with a pH of 8.5 could have low alkalinity (i.e. its pH can be moved to a target pH fairly easily) or high alkalinity (harder to move the pH).

What's important are Total Alkalinity and the concentrations of certain ions. To be of much use, you'd need a water report that shows...

Ca, Mg, Na, Cl, SO4, Total Alkalinity

 

Picked up a used chest freezer for my keezer build from a local ice cream maker that called it quits. When I told him what I was going to use it for, he gave me his inkbird controller, so I gave him an extra $20.

 

Brewed another ground hop ipa. First one bottled with no dry hopping, tho I did do a 6 oz flame out addition. Nice tasting .

 

Today I'm brewing up the second of four planned brews. This one is the John Snow House Pale Ale with Azacca instead of Citra, to be fermented by Nottingham. Cheers!

 

Usually I use notty for John Snows house pale and sub hops for experiments. It's a fine brew.

 

Testing the hopfenweisse that I bottled two days ago - bottling at 20c with invert sugar means it gets eaten up pretty quick. Lovely beer, a few shades lighter than the picture. Hook Norton should get rid of the Tour Completed bollocks though on their tour glass, it makes the glass look worse.

 

What a day... started off at 10am and did 10 gallons no sparge of turbid mash of pils, white wheat and flakes oats for akettle sour with good belly with plans for fruiting with mango and strawberries. Followed by adding 5 pd of fresh 2 row and the old grain remashed with lactic acidosis treated water for a quasi-partigyle style beer. Second beer ended up with 6.5 gallons at 1.040. I’m pretty happy with that. The parti beer was hopped with German tradition at 45 and 15. Will be pitching T58 tomorrow. Hope it will be a light Belgian style ale.

 

WY2124 starter currently crashing (1.5L to 3L step). Planning to brew up my German Pils tomorrow. Grist is just Weyermann Pils and Acidulated. Hopped with Hallertau Magnum for bittering and Saaz, Tettnang and Perle in the boil/whirlpool/dryhop.

OG expected 1.052, FG of 1.010... About 38 IBU.

This weekend plan to smoke some Vienna malt for an upcoming Rauchbier.

 

Found this Alcohol-by-volume calculator online. anyone has any idea how to use this?

 

I don't know about that one (and I'm not going to click on it...never heard of that domain), but here's a good one:
https://www.brewersfriend.com/abv-calculator/
You just enter your Original Gravity and Final Gravity in the boxes, and click "Update."

 

Due to 'staying home' and heavier than normal beer consumption, this keg of NEIPA blew way too quickly! I'm also finding my stash of bottled brews to be disappearing as well.

2 more batches in the works:

6% abv kettle sour, fermented with Brett Brux. Will do a quick 10 min boil post sour to infuse some IBUs, and whirlpool a liberal amount of Cascade. (I found a bunch of local Cascade in my freezer that's around 2 years old, but still smell pretty good)

10 gal batch of Enigma IPA, split-fermented with US-05 & US-04. Simple grain bill, and neutral yeast to hopefully let the Enigma hops shine. Never used these hops before but they sound amazing from the descriptors

 

Today, I'm brewing a gluten free Saison that will eventually sit on some fruit (I'm feeling blueberry atm).

Millet
Buckwheat
Rice
Quinoa
Mt Hood
Styrian Golding
Belle Saison

 

Brewing a Rye IPA today, with Magnum, Cascade, Columbus
Cheers all

 

Another new IPA on tap w/ Galaxy, Mosaic & Citra. Fermented with Lalbrew NE. I'm surprised it cleared this much. Kind of an East meets West vibe...

 

Whoops! Wrong thread. Oh well, too late now...

 

Brewing up a fresh dark ale that will be blended with the sour ale that I have been sitting on. This dark ale would best be characterized as a porter or sweet stout (but no lactose), and will have raspberries in secondary. The post-blending target is something like sour brown framboise. Really just experimenting, no idea if this will get me someplace interesting.

 

Don’t want to make a new thread but need assistance. Pitched two packets of US-05 into 10 gallons of a pasteurized good belly sour. No idea PH (kept at 90 for 72 hours) but I’ve had minimal fermentation after pitching 36 hours. No Krausen formation. I increased the temp from 65-68. I was thinking about giving her a little shakaroo. Any other suggestions?