What's Brewing & Doing - November edition

I'll be giving my equipment a thorough break down and cleaning this month. I disassembled my march pump the other day to give it a look over for the first time in 3 years. It was absolutely disgusting.

Then I'll hopefully get to a Porter and a PA this month

 

Over the weekend, I brewed a blonde ale that got Yeast Bay's Melange strain, and is fermenting away happily. I'll check in it in a few weeks, but its destined to get dry hopped, probably with mosaic, but I haven't decided 100% yet. I also tasted my Irish Imperial Stout that has been sitting on oak soaked in Jameson for about a month. It was tasting amazing, but not much Jameson, so I added a couple ounces and will check on it again in a week. Getting back to more regular stuff for the next batch though, probably another batch of IPA.

 

Today I am stopping by the LHBS to pick up ingredients for brew day this Saturday... My dad has a crazy obsession with Zombie Dust, so I am going to do a clone recipe for him. He can't get enough of it, so that 4 gallons should go quick if it comes out anything like it.

 

Brewed up a Green Magic experimental hop IPA yesterday...Smelled delicious going into the fermentor!

 

I kegged 7 gallons of 13% ABV 100% Brett b Imperial Stout today with Hungarian Oak cubes soaked in Bourbon. Will dry hop it after a couple months. Also finishing a new batch of yeast extract, making a starter for this weekend's Biere de Garde, and also inverted some specialty sugar for it as well. Some cleaning in the brew house as well. Added some Orval WLP650 Brett b to a keg of my 2 Brett strain Session Saison to see how it does with some age and funk.

 

The sodium benzoate has me wondering if there is enough in the concentrate to keep our yeasties from preproducing, particularly if I'm aging a sour on it.

I did find this puree site and am going to give the passion fruit and pomegranate concentrates a try: https://www.perfectpuree.com/shop/
going to order 2 of each and start by adding one per 2.5 gallons and see how it tastes early on and add the other jars if necessary later.

 

I saw that stuff before, but was too cheap to order it. One can of concentrate makes 52oz of juice. That puts it somewhere around $100 a gallon of passionfruit juice.

 

Is right. I'm hoping that the quality will be worth the price!

 

@stealth will we be seeing a None More Passionate?

 

You're getting a little too personal now, Curt.

 

Working on a Maple coffee porter into the late night hours right now! Partial mash with extract so I should get some sleep.

 

You live life dangerously. How do you usually rack from the fruit?

 

After doing a cold crash for a few days the fruit tends to compress down fairly well, even the purees, and I really haven't had any troubles ever. Towards the end some puree or tiny fruit chunks might get pulled into the bottle, but it doesn't effect the quality of the bottled beer at all - it all settles to the bottom anyways and doesn't get disrupted by a gentle pour.

 

Bottled my SMaSH today, Blacklands Pale Moon 2-Row with Galaxy Hops. Smells amazing.

 

On Friday I'll be brewing Northern Brewers Spiced Winter Ale Extract Kit. I'll be using Wyeast 1728 and this will be my first experience not using dry yeast. I'm going to do my starter tonight so it will be ready to go on Friday.

I need to stick with brewing extracts as I do not have the time for All-Grain. I'm now doing full-boils and using a yeast starter thanks to the tips that someone shared from HomeBrew42.

 

You could try brew-in-a-bag, when I switched from extract to BIAB my brew days only lengthened by about 30 minutes (since I was steeping grains for my extract batches anyway). And mashing is a pretty low-impact activity that you can do while you cook, clean the dishes or give the kids a bath, so it's not too hard to work it into your day.

 

Okay, I'll look into that. I have a 8 gallon pot, do I need to invest in any other equipment for BIAB?

 

Also, being that this is my first attempt at using a yeast starter should I plan for a blow off or can I use my standard airlock? OG is 1.047.

 

1728 doesn't make a ton of foam. I always use a blow off tube and use 1728 a lot. 1728 has never blown off with 2 gallons of head space and a 1.066 OG.

 

If you already have a burner that can do full boils, then the only thing you'll need is a bag (~$8 or so). I'd also suggest some (optional) quality-of-life gear that you might already have lying around:

- grate to put the bag on to let it drip into the kettle after you remove it (alternately: I toss the bag in a 5G bucket with a plastic colander to keep it off the bottom, then empty the wort from the bucket into my kettle when it's done dripping)
- silicon gloves for squeezing the bag to get more wort out
- stainless steel colander to put on the bottom of the kettle (allows you to heat directly to maintain mash temp without melting the bag)

With an 8G kettle, you might have to make slightly smaller batches if you want to do big beers with long boils. I have a 10G kettle and it nearly overflowed when I brewed my tripel at ~1.090.