Stewing Over Brewing: 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.