I’ve worked pretty hard for this one. 6 carboys downstairs and 7 kegs full of beer. It’s a great feeling. I’d like to get 3 more brew days in before first snow fall (2nd week of October). Gotta order some more grain soon!
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Good job! I had that kind of work ethic when I first started brewing, too! Now I just want to upgrade my kettles so I don’t have to brew so much. :D
Thanks! It would appear that now that I have enough beers to last me the winter, I can put some money toward saving up for an upgraded kettle, burner and perhaps a stand with pumps. I’d love to properly sparge at the right temp and flow-rate, get some electric thermometers and a PH meter. Close to 1K in equipment but it’ll be worth it.
pH meters are a pain in the ass and only worth it if you brew every day. Get ColorpHast Strips.
PH Meter recommended by Mr. Hill himself. He’s tasted a lot of my beer and has told me repeatedly to get a cheap one. They’re a pain but that I really need to get my PH down if I want to brew “decent beer”
You can brew better than decent beer and not worry about pH. Worry about yeast pitching rates and fermentation temp first. And I’m not talking ambient temp, I’m talking the temperature of the fermenting beer.
Yeah. Good points and I agree. I think sanitization is going to become key as well. I need to get painters tape and mark off every bit of equipment that touches wild yeast and buy new stuff for Saccharomyces.
Like I kegged a rebrew of my honey wit last week, opened it up today to add a bit of priming sugar (since I can’t force carb currently) and there’s a pellicle forming that wasn’t in the carboy. The beer only has Wyeast “Belgian Wit” added and I scrubbed all of those carboys and kegs and did a soak of my equipment in a star-san bath last week (siphon, tubing, etc) and yet this will now be a soured or at least brett Witt beer.
That’s frustrating so I love brewing sours but the occasional standard beer is also getting soured so I need to fix the cleanliness aspect.
That does sound frustrating. Yeah, having separate equipment for wild yeasts is a good idea if you’re going to be doing it a lot. Fermentor and Kegs are not 100% necessary, but definitely any tubing that you use after pitching wild yeast. Not that a separate Fermentor and Kegs wouldn’t help as well. It’s a lot easier for a homebrewer to do that than, say, Russian River.
But I hear Russian River is currently working on 100% moving their wild beer production to a separate brewery from where they do non-wild beers. Not because of any issues, I imagine. It would just be easier to separate the equipment by geographic location than by a piece of colored tape.
Putting it this way though, in the last 10 batches of beer, 8 have been using wild yeast.
So to be honest, I’m more concerned about brewing a Saison with Brett Trois and then that saison getting a Lacto infection (which happened early this summer) than I am an IPA getting a Brett infection.
So it’s sort of coming down to I MUST figure out sanitization or every beer I brew will have the same yeast in it because siphoning every beer gives it Brett Trois, Lacto, Pedio, some weird sach strains, etc.
PBW and StarSan are your friends.
I think up next since most of what’s downstairs is all sours
-Rebrew my All Galaxy 12.5% Barleywine
-Attempt a Heady Topper Clone (plenty of recipes and yeast is easy to come by)
-Rebrew last year’s coffee stout (9.5% ABV, lots of chocolate and 24 ounces of espresso added)
-Attempt a Zombie Dust clone because I have a lot of Citra in the freezer that needs to be used.
That might be it for 2013. Still, lots of beers can probably put the first 3 in carboys by the 1st week of October.
Maybe you should look into no chill…then you wouldn’t have to have it all fermented before winter….that is what I do and I love it. I brew 10 gallons at a time and then just ferment 5 and leave the other in the no chill for a few months and ferment it when I want to. The australians invented and perfected it and I LOVE IT!
Adam, what water adjustments are you making to your beers? Are you just brewing with the same water for each beer? I’m just curious, because as Alan said above, pH meters are a pain in the ass. I feel that the important thing is just understanding pH, what affects it, and what sort of water styles you like for each beer. You can use the online mash pH calculators to have a ballpark estimate as to where it will be, without having to mess around with a finicky meter. That’s just my $.02.