My most intriquing brew (so far)

As I’m typing this I have decided that the Cranberry/Blueberry/Wheat beer that I’m drining is the last one I’m touching… at least for a couple of weeks, maybe a month. When it’s out of exile I think it will be fantastic.

I had expected this beer to be terribly tart from the cranberries, or overpowered from the blueberries, perhaps sweet. It is none of the above, if I didn’t know what was in it I wouldn’t be able to determine the berry that flavors it. It is quite subtle. Aging is going to be very good for this one.

The picture of the wheat beer

Typically my picture taking leaves a lot to be desired, as evidenced by my first shot of the wheat beer in the mug. You can see it,

Notice that it’s dark, you can’t see the real color of it. With the help of a little ghetto photo studio and a movie light I got the shot in the post below. Here’s the “studio”…

It’s a piece of marine grade vinal draped over a step-stool! The movie light is on the floor under it (not turned on in this picture). Illuminated the beer pretty well I thought. Can’t wait to try it with the two fruit beers…

My first wheat beer

Well, there’s a first for everything, and right at this moment I’m sampling my first ever wheat beer. It’s an American Wheat kit from True Brew that Jason & Kerry gave me quite a while ago.

It looks like this

Haven’t had enough of it yet to know if I like it. It’s “fizzy feeling” on the tongue because it is primed at a much higher rate than I normal do. Apparently wheat and fruit beers are generally primed for more volumes of CO2. I haven’t decided if I like that either… it “bites” the tongue a bit,sort of like champagne does. In fact, some of the cloudiness  in the beer isn’t haze at all… it’s bubbles of CO2!

More on the temp control

Well, I’m a little less tired now…the last post was written after I finished with making the control board at 12:03 am.I’m in the process of trying to find the right spot on the dial for the 65 degrees I want it to be in there. I make a trip to the basement about once an hour and tweek the dial a bit. Once I find the exact spot I’m going to make a mark with a sharpie (if I need to) and then put the beer that’s bottle conditioning in my kitchen in there for a week. If it doesn’t explode (it’s very heavily primed with sugar!) I’ll move them to the fridge next weekend and we’ll give it a try next Sunday evening.

Here’s a better shot of the control board. It will be closed in and made into a tower once I get it regulated. I don’t remember if I already said this or not, but the top half of the outlet is to plug the freezer into when I need to cool to the proper temp, the bottom half is to plug the heater into when I need to warm it up to the correct temp.

Here’s a shot of the heater it controls. It’s a simple electric resistance unit that has two settings (750 watts and 1500 watts) and a fan. I might look at it and see if I can run the fan all the time and turn the heating element on as needed.

Another step toward better beer

A few weeks ago I decided that my fermentation temps flucuate too widely. The corner of the kitchen that I was placing the fermenter in varied from mid-50 temps to mid-60’s, depending on time of day (set-back thermostat takes house temp to 65 degrees or so during the night) and outside temperature. I didn’t realize how wide the variance was until recently, but I knew it wasn’t stable enough. Better beer requires better control of the temperature that the beer ferments at, and I basically felt that I had little or no control.

With that in mind I got on Freecycle.org and began my search for a chest freezer. I think it took about 3 days to find the one I wanted. It was still available, so for the great price of zero I picked up the main part of my temperature controlled fermenting chamber. It;s old and heavy, but at 19 cubic feet it’ll hold a lot of beer!

Finally, yesterday, I bought a thermostat to construct the temperature control unit with. I looked in the Grainger catalog and found a line-voltage thermostat that is rated for 22 amps for the low price of $15! I went during lunch and picked it up. Later when I took it out of the box to check it out I discovered that it has a terminal for normally open AND one for normally closed. Heating or cooling…super!!

Tonight I built it.

In the picture the plug from the freezer is plugged in the cooling side, as the outlet is devided and the top receptacle is cooling and the bottom is heating.

More later

How to tell when a homebrewer’s wife is on vacation

Well, I’ve been busy while my wife is gone to visit family. Racked the fruit beer to secondary, stayed at work and built a 3-tier structure, which is convertable to a 1 or 2 tier, and, last night, painted the sucker…in my KITCHEN!

This thing is made from bedframes, most of which I got from people on local freecycle.org groups. If you don’t know freecycle, and you’re trying to do things on “the cheap” (I have a total of $57 in this structure, which includes 2 turkey burners, the paint, a dropcloth, and a wire brush!) you need to check this site out!

It’s alive… and growing!

The fruit in the beer has started the fermenting going again. The cranberry/blueberry has pushed fruit out of the jug twice already! If you look closely at the jog on theleft you can see fruit on the left outside of the jug.It looks like the initial 4%abv is going to get seriously booted up in this one

.

The inventory

Just a quick picture of the inside of the “beer fridge”

Well, my first attempt at a fruit beer is in the jugs! One has raspberries added to an american wheat, the other has equal amounts of cranberries and blueberries… only problem is that at this point I forget which is which and didn’t label them! Guess I’ll find out later this week.

In bottles!

The Old Brown Dog clone, hereafter called “Brown Puppy”,

and the Corona clone ( Colona) are happily residing in amber 12 ounces bottles!
Bottled them Saturday, and for once, pretty much without incident.Like most of my projects this one started innocently enough when on Friday night I decided I’d was “a few” bottles. My plan was to get a start on them so that Saturday morning would be less work. I needed 96 12 ounce bottles…and ended up washing 100! Bedtime was NOT early… 3:30 am. It was just going so well, I had a rythmn going and all that. At some point during the night I handled every empty bottle I have, even de-labeled about 40 of them. I even devised the best system ever for removing labels! I put the bottles standing up in a cooler full of the warmest water I could put my hands in and added 3 scoops of Oxyclean. The labels fell off in just minutes, ev

After going to bed at 3:30 I didn’t feel very much like an early start, so at about noon I gathered the stuff and began the bottling process. After I bottled the Brown Puppy I sanitized the bottles for the Clona in Iodophor and dried them in the dishwasher.

While waiting for the bottles to dry I got a turkey fryer set up outside and brewed a 5 gallon batch of wheat. It’s probably pretty safe to say that all future brews will be outdoors brews! The water was boiling in about 10 minutes…which compares to more than 1/2 hour for the same 2 gallons in the house! I also had a major boil over with absolutely no impact on anything but the volume of wort. Just a major improvement over using the stove. Made me want to get my brewtree made all the more.

When the boil was done I dumped 3 of the 4 gallons of water I had placed in my beer freezer into the fermenter and dumped the wort in. The water wasn’t quite cold enough, but pretty close as I came up with a temperature of 80 degrees. I also had to add another 1/2 gallon of cooled water to bring the total volume up to 5 gallons. After I added the water I sloshed the wort very vigorously and took an sg reading… 1.051. Absolutely right on target! I proofed the yeast (came in the kit, I forget what it was) and pitched it.

Back to bottling! It took a surprisingly short period of time to bottle 45 bottles and cap them. I guess that’s waht happens when there aren’t any incidents! It was so uneventful that there’s is nothing at all to write about it.

I took a short break and then washed and rinsed everything to put it away for the next event… the racking of the wheat to secondary. When that happens I’ll split the wort into a 3 gallon carboy and 2 one gallon jugs. The jugs will be flavored…one with frozen cranberries, the other with raspberries. I’m curious to see what it all tastes like…my taste of the fresh wort was so wheaty that I thought I was drining a bowl of Wheaties cereal! I sure hope that changes… a lot!