Beer Obsessed: Beer and Brewing Journal

the last couple of weeks have been spent with my second daughter who was born on May 27. Family and I are all doing well and the time off together was great. Now that we are getting a new flow going to our lives plus one, it’s time to get back to the business of beer.
Thanks to all the kind words from everyone!

Corny Keg Fermentation.
I wanted to split out a batch of mead so that I could rack some of it over fruit. I knew one of my 2.5 gal cornies would be the way to go but I needed a way to get an airlock on. There are expensive corny lids that you can buy out there that have a drilled out hole and coupler welded over it so that you can attach any variety of hoses, etc. but I knew there should be a much cheaper solution out there. My solution? How about free!
I took off the gas in body connector and dip tube and replaced with a short section of 1/2″ hose. From there I inserted a short piece of 3/8″ hose and inserted airlock into the 3/8. Done and works great. Click on the detail photo for a bigger view of it all.
So what is in there and why? I had 3 gallons of orange blossom honey mead fermenting away in a secondary and got the wild idea to put some of it on fresh bing (Tulare) cherries. With my nice new high performance cherry pitter (13.99 at Andronicos), I was able to stem and pit 4lbs of cherries in 15 minutes. Prior to pitting, I steamed both the cherries and their nylon bag for about 10 minutes to help sanitize. The mead was running about 8% ABV at that point so I wasn’t too concerned but wanted to steam and clean nonetheless. Cherries went in the sack that was tied shut and pushed into the carboy. I then co2 pushed the mead out of the 3 gallon carboy and filled a 1 gallon carboy…leaving the remaining 2 gals to the corny. With 2 gals of mead and four pounds of cherries, it came close to topping off the corny.
As of a week later, airlock is still bubbling nicely with it’s new sugar source. I’m sure the cherries have also buffered out any low acid levels that I may have had and I know the yeast appreciates that as well. More later.

21st Amendment Brew Free or Die recipe change??
My beer drinking has been light since I had been on call to run my wife to the hospital for the delivery of our second daughter, but also I was very tired afterwards and I needed to be awake to help out and get settled. Well, I was pretty excited to pick up a sixer of brew free or die and have a nice IPA after all of this. But whoah! from my first sip to the last, this was a different beer. Where was all of that lovely munich malt? It was gone. One of the things I loved about this beer was a healthy dose of munich which gave it a nice malty, ballsy balance to the hops. I couldn’t belive my eyes (er, tongue and nose). I’ll finish this sixer to double/triple check and I also have a friend who has some older cans to compare….all of this just to be sure. Anyway, for now it seems like their beer has gotten rid of most or all of their munich malt. Ouch. I liked it with that malt. Maybe research showed that people don’t? Before I speculate too hard, let me go back and confirm this.
Comments are very welcome here.

As mentioned in a previous blog entry, I did my research and “brewed” a mead. The big appeal is that prep time to get to fermentation is less than an hour. This beats out a beer brew day by about 5 hours. After our second child is born, I thought sneaking in a mead every now and then would keep my fermentation lust at bay until I have time to return to the longer beer brewing day.
The photos are of the racked mead from about a month ago. The carboy is still slowly bubbling away which is really good news. My original gravity on this mead was 1.100 and at racking it was 1.036. For those who don’t know these numbers, I need to be below 1.010 for a dry mead on up to 1.020 for a sweet/dessert mead. Looks like I should get there. While “brewing” mead is easy, it does require patience since it is about six months before it is drinkable and delicious.
I plan on racking this one again and making one or two more batches on top of it. Since my father-in-law has a tart cherry farm I’d like to rack one of the batches over a few pounds of his cherries and hopefully get a truly pleasurable taste out of it in the end. We’ll see. More on this mead in a month or two….

a mead and a porter co-existing

I tried brewing a mead once with horrible results. Leave it to the Jamil Show to not only get me back interested in making a mead but giving me the information to do it right the first time.
With a second child on the way, I have quietly gotten a bit forelorn because I know after May, I probably won’t be brewing for perhaps up to a year. Brewing all-grain as I do it is about 6-7 hours of work to get to where the yeast take over and do their portion of the work (propagating up yeast, measuring and milling grain, mashing, lautering, boiling, prepping and sanitizing, etc, etc). Well guess what, it only takes about 1 hour max (and usually less) to get your mead must ready for fermentation. Heck yeah. Not only do I love beer but I love the process of fermentation. It looks like there is hope to keep my love of fermentation going during the first year of my second Daughter’s life! Beer? always easy to drink it and will be able to keep enjoying it until I can get back to brewing.
How do you make a mead? Well, very simply mix a high quality honey with water and add rehydrated yeast to it. It’s a little more detailed than that but I would recommend listening to the Jamil episode linked above or buying Ken Schramm’s excellent book, The Complete Meadmaker.
My Mead used orange blossom honey and I used 3 pounds per gallon. I have 3.5 gallons total and it started at 1.100 gravity. It is now almost a week and a half later and gravity is now at 1.048 (about 7% alcohol by volume), this should go down by about 30 more points in the end. At that point, I’ll rack to a glass carboy and let it sit for a few months til it clears. I suppose this is the one thing about Meads, you have to be patient.