I racked the beer tonight. That means, that I took it from the fermenter and put it into the bucket that we will bottle from. Normally, we would bottle right away but we're going to try a dry hop step. So I added one oz of Chinook hop leaves, stirred it up and will let it sit for a few days before we bottle. The final gravity was 1.03 which translates into 4% alcohol. But, the yield was only about 4 gal so if I bring the volume up to 5 gal, which is the recipe size, it should lower the final gravity (water is ~1.0). I also took a quick lick of the siphon tube. It's going to be kick-ass; totally worthy of Gary and Wyatt. Copilot Matt and I will bottle sometime this weekend after a few hoppy days.
I've started using Book Club as a synonym to boring and sucky, and Brew Club for total awesomeness and duh' winning. Example: The kids and I were drawing pictures this evening and I had Pandora on the Jack Johnson station. Some lame Train song came on and I instinctively said, this song is so Book Club, we need Brew Club. So I dialed in the Led Zeppelin station. Brew Club.
And, we're only up to $13 on the ads. Click peoples, click! This will fund a Brew Club party at the grotto!
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Brewtherville Labs March 2011 First Meeting
There was much anticipation leading up to the first meeting of the Brewtherville Labs Brew club. Even some members of Book Club were getting jumpy. We hadn't even had a meeting yet and I get a request for a mixer from Lady K (leader of Book Club). Damn baby, let the boys brew first. Shiite.
The boys came over and we called the meeting to order. I began describing the process and the first Brew Club law revealed itself. At the mention of wort (pron. wert) all members must take a drink of beer. Sooooo I talked about how we make the wort, what goes into the wort, how to flavor the wort, how long the wort cooks, how to time the hops that go into the wort, wort, wort, wort...and so on. Next beer. We get the water to a boil and add the sack-o-grains. The club let loose many jokes about Stewie's warm grainy sack. Insert your own in the comments section below. Stewie's grainy sack boils for 45 min. We can see the nice golden brown color and aroma coming from the Crystal 80L grains. Now we're brewin'. Next comes the hop schedule. If you ever brew beer, open the bag of hops and smell them before you add them to your wort (drink). And again, insert your favorite joke in the comments section about smelling Stewie's hops. In the middle of the hop sequence, Scott thinks he's freakin Justin Wilson and decides to stick his head in the pot. More on this pic later. So we go through the whole hop schedule and it's smelling really good.
Next, we need to transfer the wort (drink) to the glass carboy (thanks John C.!). This was a little tricky even though we had a funnel that looked like Darth Vader's helmet. We had a little spillage. No biggy, easy clean-up. Then the wort (drink) gets cooled down in an ice bath. So for 30 min we do like any club would, we and talk about Mormons. Nothing bad, just about what it's like in Salt Lake...beer wise of course. Once the wort (drink) cooled down we added the yeast (Note: do not do a search for "yeast" on Google images. Nasty.). I forgot to take the Original Gravity (OG). The OG is 1.06. We were shooting for 1.062. Close enough. Now we're on to the fermenting stage. The yeast will now eat the sugar from the wort (drink) and shit out ethanol. OK, yeast don't have asses, but that's essentially what they do.
I checked the beer the next morning, and nothing happening yet. But, when I get home from work, there's a bunch of foam on the top of the fermenter. There's a little air trap at the top that is supposed to let out gas, and another outlet that is for foam. But foam is coming out of both. Minor spill, not a disaster. So I rig it so only one tube coming out for the gas and foam. Duh, winning. We go out to a rocking happy hour at Jill C's house. Jill C. is a member of book club, but we don't hold it against her. When I come home from the HH, more foam, more rigging, not too much fermenting. I give the fermenter a few swirls. I'll give it a day or two and see if it starts up. We did add quite a bit of yeast so I wouldn't be too surprised if it's done fermenting already. If nothing happens, I'll take another gravity reading and see where we are. We made a label for the Gary and Wyatt's Weird IPA, but you'll have to wait till the beer is ready to see it.
There's a theory that Jason might be a spy for that other club. He posted the above pic on Facebook and mentioned that I was looking at Scott's butt. Then, at Jill's HH he was caught fraternizing with the other club members. Brew Club is so winning, that we could easily find a replacement. But I'll leave it up to the loyal readers (all 5 of you) of this blog. See the poll on the right and vote.
That's it for now. Go drink a beer or join a book club.
Update: In the AM, more foam. I'm not liking the carboy (sorry John C.) though it's probably something I'm doing wrong. Never had a foamover with the bucket.
Update#2: Still fermenting. This is going to be some strong shit. I think I finally got the foam under control with a wider tube coming out of the top of the fermenter cap.
The boys came over and we called the meeting to order. I began describing the process and the first Brew Club law revealed itself. At the mention of wort (pron. wert) all members must take a drink of beer. Sooooo I talked about how we make the wort, what goes into the wort, how to flavor the wort, how long the wort cooks, how to time the hops that go into the wort, wort, wort, wort...and so on. Next beer. We get the water to a boil and add the sack-o-grains. The club let loose many jokes about Stewie's warm grainy sack. Insert your own in the comments section below. Stewie's grainy sack boils for 45 min. We can see the nice golden brown color and aroma coming from the Crystal 80L grains. Now we're brewin'. Next comes the hop schedule. If you ever brew beer, open the bag of hops and smell them before you add them to your wort (drink). And again, insert your favorite joke in the comments section about smelling Stewie's hops. In the middle of the hop sequence, Scott thinks he's freakin Justin Wilson and decides to stick his head in the pot. More on this pic later. So we go through the whole hop schedule and it's smelling really good.
I checked the beer the next morning, and nothing happening yet. But, when I get home from work, there's a bunch of foam on the top of the fermenter. There's a little air trap at the top that is supposed to let out gas, and another outlet that is for foam. But foam is coming out of both. Minor spill, not a disaster. So I rig it so only one tube coming out for the gas and foam. Duh, winning. We go out to a rocking happy hour at Jill C's house. Jill C. is a member of book club, but we don't hold it against her. When I come home from the HH, more foam, more rigging, not too much fermenting. I give the fermenter a few swirls. I'll give it a day or two and see if it starts up. We did add quite a bit of yeast so I wouldn't be too surprised if it's done fermenting already. If nothing happens, I'll take another gravity reading and see where we are. We made a label for the Gary and Wyatt's Weird IPA, but you'll have to wait till the beer is ready to see it.
There's a theory that Jason might be a spy for that other club. He posted the above pic on Facebook and mentioned that I was looking at Scott's butt. Then, at Jill's HH he was caught fraternizing with the other club members. Brew Club is so winning, that we could easily find a replacement. But I'll leave it up to the loyal readers (all 5 of you) of this blog. See the poll on the right and vote.
That's it for now. Go drink a beer or join a book club.
Update: In the AM, more foam. I'm not liking the carboy (sorry John C.) though it's probably something I'm doing wrong. Never had a foamover with the bucket.
Update#2: Still fermenting. This is going to be some strong shit. I think I finally got the foam under control with a wider tube coming out of the top of the fermenter cap.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Great time tonight. I'm going to need a few days to process before updating the blog. Be patient and stay tuned.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Setup
The husbands are a bit jealous of the wives' book (i.e. wine) club. So we're starting brew club. And we're not even pretending that our club is anything other than a brew club. We're not starting a golf club where we sit around and drink beer. We're not starting a band where we sit around and drink beer. We're starting a homebrew club where we sit around and drink beer...and brew every once in a while. It's taken a few months to get up and going, but Thursday night, St. Patty's day, is our first meeting.
Here's how it will work. There are 5 dudes in the group, two guys will be the beer meisters. These guys get to decide what style of beer we are brewing, go shopping, foot the bill, come up with the name for the beer and are basically in charge of brewing. The other three guys watch/learn and work on supplying empty bottles for the brew. One to two weeks after we brew the beer the beer meisters will get together to bottle. Others can join, but are not required. Two weeks after that, we distribute the bounty and brew the next batch. The first batch is not quite ready for another two weeks at least. Depending on the yield, the three consumers will get at a minimum, two 22oz big boy bottles. The beer meisters will split the rest. Maybe we'll split it a little more even; it really depends on how much we brew. It should be about 2 1/2 cases. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Matt and I are taking the first shift. We're brewing an especially hoppy IPA inspired by our ski/snowboard trip to Wisp. It was about 34deg. and raining. So we came inside and enjoyed a few Loose Cannon's. We were quite taken by the grapefruit flavor of the hops. A few weeks later when we finally got around to selecting our brew style we decided to go for the Loose Cannon. Matt came up with the brilliant idea to call it, "Gary and Wyatt's Weird IPA" named after the infamous Weird Science characters.
I went shopping at Maryland HomeBrew and bought the ingredients. Here's the list and hop schedule:
1lb. Crystal malt grain 80L (cracked) (30min)
8lb Xtra light Malt
2.0oz Chinook, 1.0oz. Cascade @ 60min
1.0oz Cascade and Chinook @ 15min
1.0oz Centennial @ 5min
1.0oz Cascade @ 0min
2.0oz Chinook Dry Hopped @ racking (still haven't figured out how I'm going to pull this off)
5.0oz Priming sugar
American Ale Yeast
2.5 Gal boil for 60min
All hops are pellets except for the dry hop Chinook. We're just using the bucket brew method except for a glass carboy for fermentation (thanks John C.!). Tomorrow night I clean all the stuff to get ready. Then it's brew time.
Here's how it will work. There are 5 dudes in the group, two guys will be the beer meisters. These guys get to decide what style of beer we are brewing, go shopping, foot the bill, come up with the name for the beer and are basically in charge of brewing. The other three guys watch/learn and work on supplying empty bottles for the brew. One to two weeks after we brew the beer the beer meisters will get together to bottle. Others can join, but are not required. Two weeks after that, we distribute the bounty and brew the next batch. The first batch is not quite ready for another two weeks at least. Depending on the yield, the three consumers will get at a minimum, two 22oz big boy bottles. The beer meisters will split the rest. Maybe we'll split it a little more even; it really depends on how much we brew. It should be about 2 1/2 cases. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Matt and I are taking the first shift. We're brewing an especially hoppy IPA inspired by our ski/snowboard trip to Wisp. It was about 34deg. and raining. So we came inside and enjoyed a few Loose Cannon's. We were quite taken by the grapefruit flavor of the hops. A few weeks later when we finally got around to selecting our brew style we decided to go for the Loose Cannon. Matt came up with the brilliant idea to call it, "Gary and Wyatt's Weird IPA" named after the infamous Weird Science characters.
I went shopping at Maryland HomeBrew and bought the ingredients. Here's the list and hop schedule:
1lb. Crystal malt grain 80L (cracked) (30min)
8lb Xtra light Malt
2.0oz Chinook, 1.0oz. Cascade @ 60min
1.0oz Cascade and Chinook @ 15min
1.0oz Centennial @ 5min
1.0oz Cascade @ 0min
2.0oz Chinook Dry Hopped @ racking (still haven't figured out how I'm going to pull this off)
5.0oz Priming sugar
American Ale Yeast
2.5 Gal boil for 60min
All hops are pellets except for the dry hop Chinook. We're just using the bucket brew method except for a glass carboy for fermentation (thanks John C.!). Tomorrow night I clean all the stuff to get ready. Then it's brew time.
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