Keeze is pouring beer!

The keezer, kegerator, or whatever you want to call it, now referred to as "Black Betty" is working.  it pours fantastic beer.  I can't wait to get brewing so that I can fill it up.  Right now it has the APA and American Amber Ale on tap. I'm hoping to add in a nice blonde ale, and maybe a brown ale of some sort. I'd like to have a spectrum of beers being served. Kind of what are you in the mood for.  Here is a link to the forum that I posted my progress along the build. You can see how it was created every step of the way.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/my-ongoing-keezer-project-235681/

Here is the finished product!

It's Kegging Time!

Alright! I picked up my kegerator kit last Wednesday.  I ended up going ahead and springing for a full 4 taps, plus the kegs. I upgraded my taps to the Perlick 525ss faucets.  I have all the shanks, hoses, quick disconnects, manifolds, and regulators I needed.  I immediately consulted Paul and kegged up the two batches i had waiting in fermenters for this momentous occasion. That was soooooo much nicer than rinsing out 48 individual bottles, loading them into the dishwasher, waiting for them to cool and then filling 48 individual bottles.  I just risned the kegs out with oxyclean, sanitized them and racked in my beer. So much less hassle.

I spent all Saturday looking around for a suitable freezer.  I came home with nothing.  On Sunday evening I took a look at craigslist to see if anything new had popped up.  There were two promising posts that I saw.  Monday around lunch time I called them up. One was already gone.  The other...Bingo!  Available.  The guy on the phone described the freezer to be much larger than it actually was, so when i got there, I was a little discouraged.  I put in my cardboard rounds that I made so that I could see if the freezer would be large enough.  The fit was tight, but I said, the hell with it.  I'll make it work.  When I got the freezer home popped in my kegs and they fit like a glove.  I couldn't have asked for a better freezer. 

Now I've got the task of actually converting this thing into a Kegerator.  I've got an amazing plan in my head.  I've just got to figure out how to execute it.  I'll keep posting with pictures along the progress.

Hops? Yes please!

I do not consider my self a fan of super hoppy beers by any means.  Paul over at 12 Paws brewed up his Hop Bomb beer a while back.  Man was that thing hoppy.  My exact words when I first tried it were "I respect it, I respect that beer, but damn, I do not like it."  I was also well into the middle of our Halloween party, so probably not the best time to try it.  I tried it again a few weeks later and didn't mind it as much.  It actually has a nice malty undertone.  His 30th birthday was just the other day so my friends and I all pitched in and picked him up a Blichmann Hop Rocket.  I'm actually a little exited to taste beers that use it as an in-line hop infuser and one that uses it as a Randalizer. 

All this talk about hoppy beer made me want to take my first venture into something with a bit more bite in my own brewing.  I decided it was time for me to brew an American Pale Ale.  I wanted something that was distinctly a hoppy pale ale, but not too overpowering.  I brewed it up about 13 days ago. I racked it over to the secondary earlier this week.  When I tasted it, at the test, it was spot on.  Very crisp flavors with a nice floral hoppy bite at the end.  I'm excited about this beer because I will most likely be the first of my brews to go into a keg.  I'm excited about that.  I'll have to go pick up all the stuff to do that sometime over the next week or so.  Then its on to building my ultimate beer dispensing apparatus.

Holiday beer update

So...I went to the store yesteday, picked up some dried Ancho chilis from the produce dept, but since they were just laying out, i figured I needed to sterilize them first.  I also wanted to add in some more cocoa powder. It was evident by looking at the fermenting bucket that most of what I put in during the boil was lon longer there. So I boiled up some water and added in the cocoa powder so that it wouldn't clump when I added it to the beer. I poured this over the chilis in a mixing bowl and let it sit for a while. I put all that into the secondary and then racked in on top of that.  I had enough beer i was all the way up to the neck of the secondary.  MISTAKE.  I remember reading that when you rack into the secondary you will see a little bit of fermentation action because it kind of reacitvates the yeast a bit. Well...when i was taking the dogs out this morning I noticed it smelled like beer in the man cave so I decided to check on the brew. Definitely had beer coming out of the air lock and a nice puddle siting on the floor.  Its going to be some good beer I think.  I wonder if the cocoa powder or the Ancho chilies had extra fermentable sugars that boosted this. (The cocoa powder shouldn') I'll bottle this when I get back from Christmas and I'm betting its going to be a fantastic beer. 

 

On a secondary note, I had, prematurely I might add, pulled one of my holiday spiced ales and put it in the fridge. It had only been in the bottle a week at that point.  I tasted it last night and let me say that it is definitely an interesting beer. It almost taste like a ginger beer, which is weird considering there's no ginger in it.  I believe it was the nutmeg coming through, and I wished it was a bit more subdued in that regard.  You can tell it is a high alcohol beer too!  It wasn't very well carbed but that might be a result of prematurely opening it.  I think with a bit of aging, this beer could be good. As it is, its drinkable, in small doses. 

 

Merry Christmas!

Good weekend in Jake's beerland

Firs off, as an update, I bottled my Holiday Spiced Ale last night. It had great color, good clarity. The flavors were there, its a little heavy on the nutmeg, but I can handle that. I only got 38 beers out of the batch so this will be called a "limited" beer from Two Dogs Brewery.  But hey, its got about 7.5% ABV so i guess in the end, you don't actually need as much.

Saturday afternoon Paul and I got together for a joint brew day again. He once again took on the task of an all grain recipe, while I stuck with a partial mash.  I had been toying with the idea of a Chocolate Chili Stout.  My last attempt at a stout, I have deemed undrinkable. It had a good aroma and mouthfeel, with a nice thick head, but when I drank it, it had a bitter astringent flavor.  So, with great remorse, I have decided to pour them out. I'm going to keep a cople bottles around for a few more months and just see if anything develops in them.  But I digress.  Since my first stout was a miserable failure, I've decided it was time to try another. This time I knew I wanted to do a Chocolate stout, but I wanted to add some flair. So I debated, researched, and debated some more on how I was going to achieve the chili flavor in the chocolate stout.  I used a couple of different methods actually. 

I picked a handfull of cayanne peppers that had turned red from my personal pepper garden and slightly dried them in the oven, just to remove that raw pepper flavor. I cut them up and removed some seeds. I let them steep in boiling hot water to extract the flavor. The first time I did this, it wasn't strong enough so I added in some more and did another batch.  I added in this tea at the boil.  at 10 minutes left in the boil I also added in a dried Ancho and some other dried chilis to try and get a bit more chili flavor into the brew.  I immediately started to smell the chili aroma. I will admit I got a little scared when I started to smell the chilis. I didn't want it to get too spicy, so I pulled out a couple of the hotter chili pods.  I figure if I test the taste at 1 week in the primary and the chili isn't coming through, I'll just rack into the secondary on top of some more chilis to pick up some more flavors. I'm not sure, but I might have to do this with the cocoa as well. So...I will keep my fingers crossed on this one. I have high hopes and if it comes out good. I'd like to make it an annual batch. 

I also finally got around to making myself and immersion chiller on saturday. Until now, i've been borrowing others or just using an ice bath.  It cost me about $43 bucks, but it is only a 20 ft coil.  I would really like to make a 50 ft. coil. Maybe one day I'll pull the money together when I think I've run out of stuff to buy for brewing.  Good news is, that I do have enough input hose that i can make a prechiller out of that to help the process next time. 

So, now that I seem to have ramped up production and am starting to get my pipeline going, I'm going to need to get a label together. I'm thinking i'm just going to do one label for all normal beers. I might make special labels for seasonal or annual batch beers.  I'll post once I have something to show.  Most likely it will look similar to the Lazy Dog Stout label.

Tis the Season

Well, its been too long since i've actually written about by brewing exploits.  I've got some catching up to do.  I have brewed and bottled another batch of the Junkyard Dog American Amber Ale.  This brew got such great reviews from everyone, I decided to try it as a partial mash. I did this at my house, with no other supervision.  I hope it turned out ok. I took a lot of precaution when steeping the grains to make sure the temperature was right on.  I brewed in a 5 gallon brew kettle, so I inevitebly had to add in about a gallon and a half at the end of the brew in order to bring it up to volume. I don't think that affected my O.G. too much. This was also the first time I tried using Paul's meathod of not running the brew through a chiller before putting it in the fermenter.  I cooled it as mucha s possible, and then pitched the next day. I got all the way to bottling without any infections so we should be good. I've got another week and a half before they are set to drink. We shall see.

So now that we are caught up...

Last weekend Paul called me up on friday and said, hey, lets brew. He was doing his first all grain.  Scarry stuff. I wanted to brew too. I had been in the mood to get a holiday ale on my tap so I aquiesed to his request.  So I had a delima to resolve. Paul only had one brew kettle, and one burner.  I had my 5 gallon that i could have used, but as brewers will be brewers and I was at Academy buying a burner anyway, I spotted a very nice 10 gallon pot.  I wanted stainless steel, but they only had that in the 7.5 gallon.  I really wanted the 10. So, I got myself some new brewing equipment, Yay! me.

Now, on to my brew. I knew I wanted to do a Holiday ale. All the recipies I looked at were hop heavy. I understand people's love for hops, but i prefer a nice malty beer. On the same note, I also wanted to add in a little holiday cheer. I wanted to make this a spiced ale. I found another recipie and picked an chose some of the spices from that one.  I chose to add in some nutmeg, cloves, cinamon, and orange zest.  What I was hoping for was some nice subtle hints of the spices.  I added in about a half a teaspoon of nutmeg, 3/4 a teaspooon of ground gloves and 3 cinnamon sticks and a whole orange zest with 5 minutes left in the boil.  I figured, that little amount in 5 gallons of wort couldn't possibly be too strong. Man I was wrong.  That wort smelled like pumkin pie. Which, on one hand is exactly what I was going for, on the other hand, it was much stronger than I anticipated. We will have to wait til Christmas to find out. Hopefully the spices mellow out and become more subtle after the brew ferments and sits for a few weeks. 

I want to do this!

It has come to my attention that it is time for me to start kegging my beer.  Well, the issue with that is that I then need a way to dispense said beer.  I could just go get a kegerator, easy enough, but they can be a little expensive and you don't get much out of it.  I could become the intrepid do-it-yourselfer and try and do this.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/yet-another-freezer-conversion-71683/

Or I might go somewhere in between. But I really like this idea.  plus it looks very classy.