Captain Video's Mountain Retreat

Finally gettin'round'ta bottling up our (hard) cider!

First step: Blend!  In the background of the photo above, the gallon bottle on the left is fermented-out, bone-dry, apple wine from the apples in our yard - picked, pressed, and fermented in the fall of 2008 (seriously, we picked all the slugs out, I promise!).  On the right is a jug of regular (sweet) cider.  The apple-wine has absolutely no sugar left in it -- not super pleasant on it's own, but it's warm, clean, and has a nice aroma.

So  GF and I mixed up different blends, seeing what tastes good (3 parts hard to 1 part sweet is what we've picked -- I'd estimate that as coming in at about 7.5% ABV at that rate -- just a guess), and bottling up a sample to see if it gets overcarbonated or explodes during bottle conditioning.  If it does, I'll kill off the viable yeast in the hard cider, blend, and then bottle with a primer instead.

First impressions:  Surprisingly good.  The blend we picked has a nice sharpness to it.  I'm totally not minding drinking this sans carbonation.  At this point the retro-taste is where you get the most apple flavor, drawing air through it brings out the alcohol, and the tartness lingers in the aftertaste.  This will be nice if  it carbonates well -- even if it dries out a bit more in the bottle.

Also brewing up an ESB (English style English Special Bitter, not Northwestern style Redhook ESB).  The garage smells awesome :)



I kegged up an previous batch of the same earlier -- which means I got the first taste that's indicative of where this will end up.  I love the hopping on this, and it's hitting the mark with the Maris Otter rather than American 2-row (those are types of barley, for my non-brewer friends).

The novelty of this batch?  I had to leave for an appointment mid-day today, so I had to interrupt the brew.  I sparged the wort to the brew kettle, pasteurized it, and then turned off the heat and left it covered for a few hours.  This created some early sedimentation of some kind in the brew kettle -- I had large flakey things floating around all through the boil -- the beer looked clearer than normal too, so we'll see what happens.  The one I kegged today was pretty cloudy (I don't mind cloudy beers - Manny's, Mac & Jacks, etc.), but it's the same formula, so we'll see if there's any difference.

mmmmm..... beer.

PS -- BREWER QUESTION:  I can sparge quickly without getting stuck, the beer is good, and the numbers are saying my efficiency is in the 75% range (simple infusion mash) -- I could slow the sparge down to be more 'in-spec' with the recipes out there, but do I need to? And if I don't, what am I potentially messing up chemically?  feel free to answer here or catch me on twitter @cptvideo -- thanks

Yay craigslist!

I picked up a stack of brewing equipment a couple days ago, and it wasn't until last night that I finally had the time to look over all the new toys. Warning: Beware the incoming train-wreck of brewing lingo -- only a couple of my friends will understand everything in here... Just indulge me while I share :) I'll try to add enough extra info to make this educational and hopefully understandable.

Essentially what I'm doing is moving from a 5 gallon "brewery," to a system with a maximum batch size of about 13 gallons -- this is what most brewers would call a "half barrel" system.

I've now got 3 converted Sankey style kegs -- one is set up as a Hot Liquor Tank ("Hot Liquor" really means "Hot Water" in brewspeek), one is the Mash/Lauter Tun (which you use to steep the grains, and then strain/rinse them), and the third is a Brew Kettle (where you boil the sweet liquid, aka, "the wort", you got from the mash. You can see my old brew kettle in picture). The Brew Kettle and the Lauter Tun both have stainless steel Phalse Bottoms (fancy strainers), and the Lauter Tun has a Sparge Arm (kind of like a sprinkler for straining/rinsing the barley -- aka, "sparging"). On the right in the picture (the white thing on the barrel) you can see the Counter-flow Wort Chiller (a heat exchanger) that I also picked up -- you use that to quickly cool the boiling-hot wort down to a temp that's safe for adding yeast.

Here's a bucket full of random smaller bits and pieces (some of this is pictured later), and on the left of this picture you see two new (new-to-me) glass carboys (big bottles used to ferment the beer) -- this puts me at 5 carboys (I'm not really trying to collect carboys, but they keep showing up -- I want to start moving my fermentation over to some 10 gal stainless corney kegs I picked up.)

The following is a blurry picture of a new dual regulator, which will be nice if I ever want to serve different beers at different pressures.

Here's some of those random bits and pieces: racking canes, bottling tubes, various hose clamps and fittings, cornelius keg fittings, picnic taps....

This interesting stuff was also included: A counter-pressure bottle filler (used to put already-carbonated beer into bottles without having it foam all over), an inline carbonator (for adding carbonation, nearly instantly, and automatically, to any liquid), and a wort aerator (add's O2 to the wort to keep the yeasties happy).

There's also an electronic RIMS control system that I forgot to take a picture of. It's made of an enclosed electric heating element, a pump to circulate the wort, and a PID temperature controller to maintain the mash temperature. I'm not sure I'm going to use this control system the way it's all put together now, but I may part it out and redesign my own system. (explanation)

One of the things that's got me the most excited is the "project" pictured below. It's a for-reals, from England, old, dual beer engine! It's functional, and it's real, but it's roached. I'll probably get into more detail on this thing in a future post.

This all represents the 3rd full do-over of my brewery. I started boiling 1 1/2 gallon wort batches that were combined with cold water to bring the final volume up to 5 gallons. At V2.0, I started boiling and cooling full 5 gallon batches (I also started all-grain brewing). Now I'm likely to be doing 10 gallon batches. Interesting note: Dogfish Head Brewery began by brewing 3 batches per day in a similar 10 gallon system -- 400 batches in the first year!