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Word on the street last night was that the moon was supposed to be full and bright and amazing. Get-your-camera amazing. Well, it was cloudy and it rained, just to make sure. I got my camera anyway. Here’s some dark pictures of rain with no moon around anywhere
In the meantime, I also kept busy brewing beer for the upcoming Super Bowl party at Camp Willow Creek. And yes, of course you are invited.
Clearly I’ve been way too busy driving around in my new car to update this website. I’ve added some pictures from our Brew Year’s Eve party. The weather was kind of awful, but the food was good and there was a lot of it because Nancy and I spent all day making sure of that.
We brought a few bottles of our first batch of homebrew to Jaime & Andy’s Beer & Brats party on Saturday night. It was a hit.
But Sunday it was back to the homebrew grind. We washed out 2 cases of bottles in preparation for bottling the Red Ale. The dishwasher cycles took a little longer than we anticiapted, so we decided to wait until tonight to actually bottle. We sampled a little while it was on its way from the fermenting bucket to the bottling bucket. I think we have another hit on our hands.
The really exciting thing about this is that so far we’ve been buying kits and following instructions. I’m reading a book right now that gives you ideas for how to be more creative as you learn the process and learn why things are how they are and it won’t be too long until we doing crazy fun stuff with the brew, just because we thought of it. I’m already talking about adding coffee to the next stout in an attempt to recreate that great micorbrew I had at the Old Harbour Brewing Co in San Juan.
Here’s some other random CWC news:
The first batch has been carbonating in bottles for the last three weeks. Today we had taste number three of that batch. We decided it was pretty good and possibly ready to drink. Of course, since this is our first batch, we don’t have much frame of reference. So just to be sure that we’re not jumping the gun, we put half of the bottles in to the fridge to chill and enjoy this week. The other half of the batch will carbonate for another week to see if we can tell a difference.
We also moved the currently-fermenting second batch from its first stage to its second. There was about a quarter inch of sediment left in the bottom of the first stage bucket. The volumn of liquid in the second stage also dropped from 5 gallons to about 4 gallons.
We’ve spared you the pictures this time. They were all turning out about the same and it’s hard to brew beer, have a homebrew AND take pictures at the same time.
Yesterday we put one of the sample bottles from the first batch of CWC Brew into the fridge. Today, right around kickoff, we had our tasting from a nice frosty mug. Pretty good. We’re going to wait until next week and try another sample, but I really think it might be ready to enjoy next week and not the following week, as we originally anticipated. Either way, we’ve got to try to save some for the 21st to share at Jaime’s beer & brats dinner. MMMM!
Today we also started a batch of red. My choice. It was a lot more fragrant in the wort stage than the stout was. Its also a lot lighter in color. We’re doing a 2-stage fermenation this time (which more or less means we wait a little longer to put it in the bottles) which I think is going to be good for two reasons. one, the flavor will have some more time to develop and two, there is a lot more sediment in this wort than there was in the last and I think moving to the second stage will clear it up a good bit and make the final product more appealing.
Another change we made this go around was liquid yeast, per a recomendation from the shopkeep. As usual, we’ll keep you posted,
This weekend marks week number 2 in bottles for the first batch of CWC Brew. We had a taste test last weekend and it wasn’t nearly carbonated enough – we also forgot to chill it before tasting. This week we expect it to be better, but we don’t expect it to be ready to drink until next week or the week after.
Although the first batch isn’t quite ready for consumption, we plan on starting batch number 2 this weekend. JDB went to the supply store today and this time, I tagged along. It was pretty cool to see all the options available. I picked a red lager for the next batch and JDB picked an English Brown for the 3rd.
We got a book and also some advise from the shopkeep. We’re going to try a few new things this time, like a liquid yeast and 2nd stage brewing. We’ll let you know how it goes.
A new project started today at Camp Willow Creek: Home Brewing.
Check out some pictures of the first day of fun.