Oops!
Posted by | Uncategorized | Posted on July 14th, 2006
Well, it happened. I posted earlier that I was worried about ordering yeast from the company in CA … turns out my worries were justified, though it wasn’t the company’s fault. We ordered a couple of batches worth of stuff all at the same time the last week of June… just before everyone shut down for July 4th. We suspect that our grain, hops, and yeast all sat around in a hot truck/warehouse for about a week and a half before we got ‘em. The grain and hops seemed to be fine … but when we pitched the yeast for the brown ale (see earlier post) it didn’t start.
Clint did have a test culture he kept from another batch which seems to have kicked his off just fine. I didn’t have anything at my house, so I ended up going to the health food store here in Cookeville to get some dry Munton’s yeast. Looks like it worked ok … fermentation was rockin’ yesterday, at any rate. Seems to have slowed considerably today and will probably be ready to transfer to secondary this weekend sometime.
So now we do one of three things I guess… order the yeast from the same place but pay for overnight or 2-day shipping, buy our yeast from a place in Nashville, or continue to culture our own.
OG on the brown was 1.048, which seems pretty low… probably related to our sparge process this last batch. The beer LOOKS awesome… great color, smelled wonderful while we were brewing. I can’t wait to try it.
Brew day
Posted by | Uncategorized | Posted on July 2nd, 2006
Well, yesterday’s brew day didn’t go quite as planned. The stuff that we ordered from our normal place in CA didn’t come in in time for us to brew… so I ended up stopping at a brewing place in Nashville and grabbing some stuff to brew a couple of batches. We made an Amber ale (10 gallons) and a 5 gallon batch of a wheat ale, which will eventually become a blackberry wheat.
I’ll post the recipes later, since I forgot to ask for them when we got done brewing.
I also kegged my cherry wheat today. It has a slight cherry flavor, but it’s mostly just a tasty wheat beer. It should be ready just in time for July 4th. I even added the dry hops to my rye IPA, which will be done and ready to keg on Wednesday or so. Very beer-y weekend!