Adventures in Homebrewing had a free shipping sale going on, so Dan and I went in together and bought two more fermenting buckets. It's a long wait from fermenting to bottling to enjoying. The rare optimistic outlook that I will in the future be able to enjoy them. Thus far, n...
Brew Log
Dan had previously brewed this Brewer's Best Summer Ale recipe with great and easy success. As with my previous batch, my intent was to do something interesting with the recipe. Code name: Fale All (lowered expectations Fall Ale) I set aside the bag of dried lemon and orange p...
Code name: Strawbeery After a week in secondary with strawberries, it was time to bottle the remaining four gallons. The strawberries had turned yellowish-gray and the beer was pink. Because of the problems with the butterfly capper the previous weekend, I designed and built "...
With a bit of nerves, I cracked open my first bottle of my first batch of beer. It didn't have much carbonation. What it did have, in abundance, was a medicinal smell. It smelled and tasted like I had fermented the IO Star sanitizer. Not great. Luckily, there is only one gallo...
I took the four glass fermenting jars and added varying amounts of strawberries that had soaked overnight in vodka. The idea was to later bottle the beer individually out of these jars and figure out which ratio of strawberries to beer tasted best. For some reason, final gravi...
The plan is to try making this plain ol' pilsner recipe a little more interesting. I'm going to split off some of the beer into secondary fermenter with added strawberries. I bought a five pound bag of frozen jumbo strawberries at the grocery store. To keep from introducing ba...
Since I have fairly low expectations for how this first batch is going to turn out, I decided to play with the recipe and make a strawberry brew. I ordered four one-gallon fermenting jars with lids, a bag of twenty rubber grommets, and six three-piece airlocks from Amazon. The...
I stopped by Fifth Season, a local homebrew supply shop, after work and picked up a few things. First, I needed priming sugar, since I didn't know to add it to the Adventures in Homebrew recipe page. Also, I picked up the 24" plastic brew paddle that my kit was missing. Lastly...
I picked up a plastic tote at Kmart on my way home from work. Filled it with water and parked the fermenter in it. Once or twice a day, I dropped a plastic freezer bag full of ice cubes in to cool it down some more. This took the temperature of the fermenter from 75° down to...
Brewing Backyard Pilsner recipe from Adventures in Homebrewing. Recipe says "Gradually bring up to 150-160" like I have the option of doing it quickly... Doing all of this for the first time, it's a little disjointed - not having things ready when I need them or within easy re...