Brewing Activities (2021)

After 4 years of not brewing I finally kicked myself in the ass and made a starter for a hefewiezen. Mice got my DME, so I'm using 3 pounds of wheat for my starter. I'll spend today thoroughly cleaning all my brewing equipment and getting ready to brew on Saturday or Sunday. I'm pretty excited about it.

 

Oddly, I am excited about it to.
Welcome back.

 

hell yeah!

 

Would love to use these hops, but can't get Southern Cross. Southern Cross and Nelson is what Alpine Nelson - one my favorite day-to-day beers- uses. Can't wait to see this one in the 'What homebrew are you drinking?' forum.

 

Looks great!

 

Just smelling the mash for the yeast starter yesterday, and the yeast starter today makes me damn happy I finally got off my ass and started the brewery again. But it will be on a much smaller scale. Still 10 gallon batches, but each batch will be split into 2 beers. Porter/coffee porter, 2 IPA's dryhopped very differently, for example

 

Early morning brew before the kids' baseball game and visiting family:

GF Blonde Ale
Pale millet
Biscuit rice
Rakau
US-05

Also dry hopping the Brett IPA (sample is bangin!)

 

Racked Passion Fruit Berliner to keg. Sample:

 

Brewed a dunkel weiss. Although i made the mistake of ordering pils malt instead of munich, but went with it anyway.

60% w malted wheat
33% w barke pils
7% w caramunich 3
About 20 ibus homegrown hallertau mittelfruh
Wy 3068 repitch from urweiss.
1.042. liked the lower abv urweisse so decided to go low again.

 

About to make the 15 min hop addition of a hoppy (I hope) APA

11 pounds pale malt
.5 pounds caramalt
.3 pounds carapils

1 ounce Simcoe at 60
1 ounce Amarillo and 1 ounce Mandarina Bavaria at 15
1 ounce of all of the above at 5.

Going to us US-05 and yeast nutrient for the first time.

Still trying to figure out the dry hopping. Two out of the last three batches I've made have had some big flaws, so I'm hoping this one turns out.

 

Just went to home brew store for a “Shove that vaccine up your ass” Saison.
50% pils
40% 2 row
10% wheat
Magnum at 60
Saaz at flameout
Fermenting with ECY saison brasserie.
Will add toasted oak soaked in Pinot grigio and then prolly add a small bottle of Pinot at kegging.
Was gonna go with Nelson but kinda wanted to leave hops out of the equation.

 

Boil underway for a 11-gal batch of IPA. 2-row, wheat, some Munich. Amarillo, Enigma and Ekuanot. Getting split between US-05 and Omega Kölsch II

 

Spruce ale after work.

 

4.75-gal Imperial Stout racked to secondary on ¾ oz. medium toast French oak chips and ¾ oz. heavy toast American Oak spiral. Will let that stew for a couple weeks then add some combo of the following for another couple weeks:
coconut flakes, vanilla bean infused bourbon, cocoa nibs, candy cap mushrooms

 

So my hefeweizen is bubbling away. Brewday went pretty smooth with just a couple of hiccups. My counterflow chiller apparently froze with water inside, so the inner pipe is cracked. I was able to convert it to an immersion chiller pretty easily. Cleaning all my gear that has collected dust for 4 years was not fun, but otherwise it was a great day.

 

Kegged up my pale ale for the kiddo's birthday party last night.
Had an interesting time with it. This is a recipe I've done a dozen times, and rarely had any issues. Brew day here went fine, hit all my numbers within a point or so, pitched my yeast, that |I did a starter as usual, left it alone for a couple weeks, then went to test. The gravity had barely budged. |It had moved less than 10 points. I grabbed a pack of S05, added it in, and things happenned, but 2 weeks after that it was still bubbling slowly. Finally had a couple days with no observable change, and it was just a couple points off expected FG, so I called it good.
|Going back through my notes, there's only a couple possibilites. I had to put off brewing for a week for reasons - the social dictator, aka SWMBO found a whole lot of things to do that weekend. Since I pitch at high krausen of the starter, it had to finish up, so I put it in the fridge after that, so it was there, sealed for 4 or 5 days before brew day. (yes, |I let it come to room temp before pitching)
The other possibility is that I used a new fermenter, with a smaller spout. Previously, I've been using an ale pail, and draining the wort through a kitchen strainer to catch the trub. I realized I didn't aerate the wort after draining to the fermenter. Could this have caused the low action of the originial yeast? (the starter did go like gangbusters for a couple days before dropping krausen.)

 

bottled the "dunkel" weisse today.

un calibrated ispindel graph comparison of its ferment with the urweisse brewed a couple weeks ago, both started at 1.042 and finished 1.010 . Both temperaures are 1 degree off too on the graph. Think it shows how a thick krausen can mess with the reading, especially at the end.

 

Gonna try a GF adaptation of Janish's BYO NEIPA: I've never added hops to the mash and don't usually do a bio-DH. Also gonna reduce the amount of Ceramix Flex enzyme to shoot for higher FG (1.018).

Pale millet
Oats
Unmalted millet
Biscuit rice

Citra, Galaxy, Bravo, Amarillo & CTZ
Verdant