Oh what a night....

When leaving work, I decided to go get another 50# bag of 2-row, So I made my way over to Brew Your Own.  Plenty of chatting- good times.

On the agenda for the night, I may have gotten a bit aggressive. I decided to brew 2 batches (one extract, one All-Grain), perform a bourbon stout experiment involving bottling and a secondary, bottle the Grilled Lemon Cream Ale, and bottle the Portly Squirrel.  This took 11 hours.

I started at 3:30.

I went to bed at 2:30.  I didn't even clean up all my equipment, so I have that to do today.

Kind of ridiculous.

Well, I also did homework with the kids, made dinner, etc.  And I actually started heating water at 3:30, so there was no "ahead of the game" as I typically set myself up.

I realize that I need to cut more slits in my mash manifold.  It drains continuously, but is very slow.  I cut slits for half and did drill holes for half as an experiment, and - yeah, I need to expand the drill holes into slits. Slow sparge, everything worked out fine.

Still digging the brew stand- it works so nicely.

Despite the long day, the only real problem I ran into was that I ran out of crown caps at 1 AM while bottling the 4th set of beer.  I have plenty of the larger, "champagne bottle" caps.  So I had to go through all my bottles and find all the champagne bottles which take those caps.  Many champagne bottles take regular caps.  Luckily, I had EXACTLY the right number of caps and everything is set.

Last month, I moved my bottle storage out into the garage, from the hallway.  Since brewing and seasonal beer collecting has been big this month... I have now filled up the garage storage area AND the hallway again.  This is not a good thing ;)  Though it is a good problem to have.

SO- I need to organize the entire garage this evening since I trashed it yesterday.

I think I'll brew while I'm cleaning. BWAHAHAHAHA!