More Wedding Beers!

Another full brew weekend.  There's a boil going as I type this - yay for live blogging!

 Yesterday was a full brew day with a full worth double batch two hour boil.  Long day to say the least.  It's getting about that time to upgrade the equipment already now that I've got some space.

It is very nice to be sitting next to 5 bubbling beer babies (carboys) just fermenting away.  I haven't had my carboys full for a good 2 months now.  

The last of the main beers for Justin & Krista's wedding was a success so far.  I went with a German wheat style Hefeweizen.  I personally am not a huge fan of the banana flavor in most wheats, so I went with a yeast strain that was just strictly clove.  For my wedding, I did basically the same grain bill, but used a more traditional weizen yeast strain and I wasn't 100% happy with the results - though others might disagree.  We're all so critical of our own work I guess.  Still have a small 5 gallon batch of a German Maibock left to brew for their wedding, but the main goodness is bubbling.

Tracy (the greatest welder evar!) came over to assist me in the brew day so that he could get a better idea of how the process works.  He's been helping design a brew sculpture with automated temperature control and the whole works!  Basically once it's done, I'll just program a desired temperature into the controller, hit go, and the stand does the work.  I'm really starting to not like all the heavy lifting and transferring, etc during the brew day.  Not to mention, my weak little arms can't even pick up a double batch keg and lift it up to a height high enough to run it through my chiller.  I want to focus more on the recipes rather than the process - though the process is pretty fun too. 

The Citra IPA seems to be doing great.  I transferred into secondary on Friday night, dry hopped, and let it go.  It tasted spot on.  And Danny, the little mishap with the hose coming off didn't matter - they all tasted the same once blended.  

Can't wait to put these in kegs and serve them up!

 Mmm, mash.

 First run - heading into the kettle.

 Every brew day starts with a cup of the force for good measure.

Gotta get a better system going - but works great for now!

Wedding beers are bubbling

It has been some time since a post - and since I've brewed for that matter.  Britt and I are finally settled in our house and I can start brewing again!

A shout out to Justin and Krista for getting married in March and letting me brew all their beer for the reception!

They wanted a half barrel of Citra (for good reason), and a half barrel of a weissbier.  Danny came up and we started out the weekend by getting the Citra done.  Let me tell you - having the room to spread out and brew is fantastic!  No more apartment brewing!!

I woke up pretty giddy on Saturday.  Britt kept asking me how many beers I'd had and I kept telling her 'none, I'm just excited to be brewing again'.  

We got some info from the local homebrew shop on how to tackle a double batch when you have the capacity on your kettle, but not your mash tun.  So we tried it out and it saved us about 3 hours that day.  I'm really starting to like all of the efficiency things we're learning as we go.  We started out by mashing the first batch.  Once we mashed out and sparged, we just let the wort sit in the kettle with a lid on it.  Instead of putting it directly to boil like we normally would, we mashed out our second batch and then added that to the existing wort to make about 13 gallons (boils down to 10 for fermentation).  This batch was flawless.  Everything went as planned and no hiccups.  We needed a third batch to reach the half barrel mark when all said and done so we had to do another batch separately because my equipment doesn't have the capacity for it all (yet).  Everything in this batch was pretty flawless as well except in the end when we went to chill it, the hose popped off going into the chiller and we lost about a gallon and a half of wort going into the fermenter (note to self, don't leave anything unattended, ever).  We just topped the batch up with water, and we're hoping that once all three batches are blended, it will all pan out.  We added about a pound and a half of dextrose to hopefully make up for the lost sugar we would have lost and diluted with water.  

Side note update - I took a bottle of our pumpkin beer 'Cinder-Ale'a' to the homebrew supply store to get some feedback and opinions from the guys and they loved it!  One of the guys doesn't like pumpkin beer at all and he said 'you made a liar out of me today'.  Now if they were actually telling the truth - who knows, but it was nice to hear from the pros anyway.

 Garage Brewing, finally!

 Mashing out.

Mash mash mash.

 Chilling.

 Chilling.

 Transferring/chilling.

That sweet sweet wort.