New Year's Week Brewing

I couldn't actually keep myself awake yesterday, for some reason I was just thoroughly exhausted, so I didn't wind up brewing anything. The amber is still bubbling very slowly and the APA is bubbling along nice and fast. I figure I will rack these beers and brew the next two batches sometime later this week and into the weekend. The next few batches will be using the yeast cakes from these two batches, so I have to rack the same day as I brew. The London ESB yeast will be used for an ESB, while the US-56 yeast will ferment an American IPA.

I will most likely be going with the recipe I already posted for the ESB. I'm still looking around to see if my hop selection is good or not, but it most likely won't get changed. The next time I sit down to compile some code I will post my tentative recipe for the American IPA.

And yes, I do have to work New Year's week, except for the 1st. Don't know yet if I'll burn one of my vacation days immediately to get Friday off. I kinda like it around here when there's only a hundred people in the building.

English Bitter

This is my first run at a recipe for an English Bitter using the yeast cake in the Amber's fermenter. I'll play around with it more tonight, then finalize it before bed so I can start brewing after grocery shopping tomorrow.

English Strong Bitter/ESB:
-9lbs British Pale Malt
-1lb Mild Ale Malt
-1/2lb Toasted Malt
-1/4lb Crystal 60L
-1/4lb Crystal 120L

-1oz Challenger Hops (7%AA) 60 Minutes
-1/2oz Liberty Hops (4.1%AA) 30 Minutes
-1/2oz Liberty Hops (4.1%AA) 0 Minutes

Mash in 3.5 gallons of water at 152F for 75 minutes.

Fermentation Update

The brief Christmas break I get is over so now I'm back in Rochester getting things done around the apartment. When I left for Ithaca a few days ago, the American Pale Ale I had in the fermenter had not started fermenting yet, while the English Amber was fermenting vigorously. Currently, the amber appears to be done and the pale ale is fermenting like crazy, we're talking about 4 inches of bubbly crap on top of the beer. I will probably take a gravity reading on the amber tonight to figure out what I want to do with it tomorrow. If it looks like it's done fermenting entirely, I will rack it to a keg tomorrow and begin carbonating it. If it's not finished entirely, I will rack it to a secondary tomorrow. Either way it's getting racked tomorrow so I can brew a beer with the yeast cake in that fermenter. I will be planning out a recipe for tomorrow shortly that uses the London ESB yeast in the amber's fermenter. I'm thinking of making a bitter, but I'm not entirely sure yet. I want to see if any of the new hop varieties, like Glacier, are at Beers of the World and maybe see if I can try out one or two of those to see how they work. Glacier apparently has some Fuggles-like qualities that make it sound interesting for an English beer.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a good holiday break. And screw all of you that don't have to work on New Year's Eve. Ugh.

Brew Day

My long hiatus from brewing is over and I'm right back into it the way I used to be. All it took was getting through that first brew day in my new place. Currently waiting for the mash to finish on my current batch. I'm making an American Pale Ale.

American Pale Ale:
-8lbs British 2-row (I know, it should be American 2-row, but I want to use ingredients I already have)
-2lbs Vienna Malt
-1/2lb Wheat Malt
-1/2oz Amarillo hope pellets (8% AA) 60 minutes
-1/2oz Amarillo 40 minutes
-1/2oz Amarillo 20 minutes
-1/2oz Amarillo 0 minutes
-Wyeast 1056 American Ale Yeast

Mashing with 3 gallons of water at 150F for 75 minutes.

Now I need to figure out what I'm going to brew next weekend. :p I want to reuse the British Ale yeast that the Amber is using, so I want to make an English style, but I'm not sure exactly what I want to do. Maybe a barleywine.

Amber Update

The amber took about 5 days to get the fermentation started. That's what I get for using yeast that was months old and not using a starter. Oh well. I also boiled up 2 pounds of light dry malt extract and poured it (after cooling) into the fermenter to boost the gravity. Adding that volume and DME leaves me with 5.75 gallons of beer with a starting gravity of 1.056. That's close enough to what I was looking for.

God damn it!

Stupid mash temperatures. I actually went through with my brewing, finally. The recipe was the amber that I posted a few days ago. The initial gravity came in at 1.040, which points to me sucking at hitting my mash temperatures. Instead of the mid-150s I was hitting the mid-140s, which is an important difference. Guess I should have extended the mash for another 30-60 minutes to let the starches convert. Oh well. I need to modify my technique to hit those temps more consistently. I may wind up brewing again this weekend to try to improve my technique. We'll see.

Bailout, anyone?

Here's a great article on the bailouts and how things could be made better for the long run with some simple changes to the banking system.

A chronicle of how GM got to where it is today. The company basically shot itself in the gut and has been internally bleeding to death for a long time. I really hope they sell the Saturn brand to someone that actually runs their company well as I like those cars. I was torn between Subaru, Honda, and Saturn when I was looking at cars last year.

Dollar GUTS!

This past weekend Angelos had his yearly party for John Dyson's birthday. I was able to rearrange my plans to drive out there Friday instead of Saturday. This is one of those weekend-long parties that usually involves the equivalent of about 6-8 cases of beer, lots of pool, poker, darts and whatnot, and frequently snow to some degree. We had plenty of all of that this year, except the darts.

Friday night it was me, Dave, Angelos, John Dyson, Brian Rusch, and Tom Jurus. That night was mostly spent giving Angelos shit for not having chips, and playing poker while drinking lots of wine and beer. I don't typically play poker, but I decided to throw in $20 and play this time. I think I lost all of that money by the end of the first 30 minutes. Yeah, I'm that bad.

In the morning I went with Brian to secure bagels for breakfast. Everyone realized how much of a mistake it was that there hadn't been any real food the night before. It was a good thing that Dave and I got subs on the drive up.

Swilly and Ken Conner showed up Saturday with chips and more beer. That day was a lot of bullshitting, drinking heavily, poker, pool, music, Angelos yelling at Ken about politics, and breaking a DVD player for not playing a movie correctly. I also got a long, drunk talk by Brian about how awesome the Greatful Dead are.

It was a great weekend until the drive home. Given that it's early December in upstate NY, and that I was going to be driving across the Thruway to Rochester, I fully expected numerous bands of lake effect. That would have been nothing for me. As I hit Utica, I was started to see the snow falling. By the time I hit a couple exits past there I realized it was a full storm. Until I got about half an hour outside of Rochester there was minimal visibility, extreme wind, and the road had about two inches of fresh snow on it. The plows had quite the interesting time keeping up with all of it. At one point I almost wound up off the left side of the road because I didn't have any traction during a gradual left curve on the highway. Thankfully I got my traction back when I started crossing the rumble strip just before the road's shoulder. I was going to let myself go off the road straight instead of turning anymore than I was so I wouldn't start spinning, but fortunately that wasn't necessary. There were a couple times where I stopped at a service area and sat there for a bit with a cup of coffee or some warm food and tried waiting to see if it would pass. Both times I did this I only saw it getting worse. Ugh.

Obviously, I made it home safely, but damn. Still, I wouldn't trade winter weather for anything in the world.

Beer Recipe

I've decided on the recipe for this week's batch of beer. I am now planning on brewing Friday morning/afternoon before I hit the road.

The recipe is as follows:

6lbs Belgian 2-row
4lbs Mild Malt
0.5lbs Crystal 120L
0.5lbs Toasted Malt

1oz Kent Goldings (60 min)
0.5oz Fuggles (30 min)
0.5oz Fuggles (5 min)

Wyeast 1098 British Ale Yeast

It's a full boil, so I can use less hops which is nice. It should give me based on some simple calculations, a starting gravity of 1.060 and a 3:1 gravity:bitterness ratio. This should be amber-ish, with the follow up batch looking to be a bitter of some sort.