Hope everyone had a great weekend. I know I did. Friday night movie night in front of the fireplace with my wife and the kids sipping some homebrew. Saturday we celebrated the middle son’s 14th birthday with all 5 of us(very rare). We had lunch at Skyline (his favorite) then we went to the range, I had forgotten how much is involved with teaching newbies firearms safety (and having 3 to teach meant not a lot of shooting but everyone had a blast. After the range we checked out some sights in Cincinnati while waiting to go see “Interstellar” at the cheap theater. Everyone came home and crashed after the 2 hours 40+ minute adventure. Sunday was beer day. I brewed 5.5G of English Style Barleywine, missing my OG of 1.103 by 3 points, I’ll take that anyday. After the boil, I boiled up some priming sugar for the Special Bitter I needed to harvest yeast from for the Barleywine. Bottled that up during the game, along with a few brews to unwind: brewing and brewing chores from 10am till after 7, with several small breaks in there. Still need to clean up after the range yesterday, guess that will have to wait til tomorrow. :o
sounds like fun man. i brewed german pils friday and spent the rest of the weekend pushing and throwing snow!
Great weekend. We had a birthday this weekend as well. I also had a chance to brew an Irish Ale.
Sounds great, Was Saturday the actual date of your son’s birthday? My son turned 24 on Saturday. I’m looking forward to this coming weekend. I’m taking Thursday/Friday off because my birthday is Friday. On Friday we’re going to the Valley ( Amherst/Northampton) and going to a nice hot tub place then going to Valley malt to buy some malt and hopefully talk a bit to the maltsers then hang out in Noho and check out shops and go to the brew pub. Then Chez Albert my favorite restaurant in Amherst. Saturday we’re Celebrating my son’s and my birthday, probably dinner here.
Congrats on the barleywine, too. Missing an 1.103 beer by only three points is pretty darn solid, considering that you often lose some efficiency on the big ones.
I brewed a style-absent brown ale on Saturday that I coolshipped and then added dregs from a couple sour beers consumed during the game. It’s a one gallon batch made with small amounts of a few specialty malts left over from previous batches along with some pale malt. I’ll see how it is in 9-12 months.
What did you use as a coolship? I’ve though about trying a small batch and using a large cake pan.
In this case I just stuck the kettle outside with the lid off. It was a one gallon batch in a five gallon kettle so there was a good amount of surface to cool and catch whatever was floating around in that storm we had.
The last time I coolshipped a beer was a year ago and it was a larger batch. I ended up using several cake pans along with the kettle. It was ridiculously windy and cold that day. The beer was freezing after being outside for an hour or so. It’s a very interesting beer right now. There’s islands of yeast floating on the surface. They are hard and bubbly like misshapen saltine crackers. No pellicle though, which is surprising. The ph is in the mid-4 range and it tastes like a really weird hefeweizen. I don’t think I got a good mixture of yeast and bacteria due to having to pull the beer back inside so quickly but the flavor is evolving so I’m just going to let it hang out and see what happens. I would not have a problem using cake pans again but I would do it on a night when it was in the 40s or 50s.
Coolshipped?
coolshipped, v: to innoculate wort naturally using a coolship.
I could coolship next time I plan on brewing, but it will just cool the wort, not many bugs and critters in the air here vs. TX.
I always feel guilty when I do the barely less work of asking a question on the forum that results in someone clicking a couple more times than I was willing to do a Google search.
I send these to my dad constantly. He still thinks that yahoo is his ISP since he uses the yahoo link on his desktop to open Firefox.
Oh that’s a keeper…love it. How do you do that?
That’s pretty awesome. Funny stuff.
Thanks Steve, great stuff. Gonna have to show the kids that
Can’t wait to use that at work! Oh boy!