It's 1:30 AM. Do you know where your children are?

Yes, I'm up at a stupid time of night.

The shocking thing is, I'm NOT watching a rediculous tv show or anything.

I realized that this w close tommy lt chance to make pickles for the homebrew smoke-out on Saturday. Since I decided that my stupid life is too busy to prepare meat to smoke, I made hop pickles.  And hop salt. Because condiments count!

Hop pickles:

2 lbs perisn cucumbers, ends removed and pickles quartered
1/2 yellow onion
4 garlic cloves, smashed
2 g Citra hops, whole leaf

-set aside

2 1/2 cups vinegar
3/4 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
5g black peppercorns, whole
1 tsp crushed red pepper
1/4 tsp turmeric
1 cup water

Bring all to a boil for one minute
Cool for 5 minutes.
Pour over pickle/onion/garlic/hop mixture.
Eat in 3 days

I placed a 1 gallon Ziplock  baggie on top of the mixture, in the bowl, to ensure that the pickles remained submerged.

These are good for up to a month in the fridge.

Also, they could taste like crap. So- don't cry to me

I also did a version with Columbus hops and my Centennial ale.

Epic Brew Day

Since my lovely wife was out of town and I had the kids and house to manage all week, I was a busy fella.  Before she came home, she said "Plan a brew day on Sunday and invite friends!"

Never one to back down from a challenge ;)  I invited our homebrew group on Facebook to join me.

I had a few people come by, and one friend brought his brew system to do a brew of his own.

I brewed 3 batches- an extract amber for a charity poker night, one of the Game of Thrones challenges- house of Arryn, and one of the single hop series for my class.

Because my fermenters were full, I bottled 2 batches on Saturday and on Sunday, while brewing 3 batches, I simultaneously bottled another batch.

Let me tell ya- considering I had so much going on at the same time, it went exceptionally well.  I don't think I missed any of my procedures, and I hit my gravity numbers on all the batches.

The only small hiccup was that I forgot to put the rose hips in on my Arryn brew until flameout.  WHICH, I can correct by boiling some rose hips in water for 10 minutes and adding it to the fermenter today or- most likely- next week.

SO- a great day, fun friends, and great brews ahead!

Failure

Oh my goodness- what the HECK is in those bottles?!?!?

The porter that I brewed for the graf... it tastes AWFUL!  I'm not sure where the failure happened, but it isn't very carbed, and it tastes like... gross.

Centennial Ale, the 100th batch- it's a diacetyl bomb. I mean, it is OK for me to drink, but it's not for sharing :(  Diacetyl is the "artificial butter" flavor- some peole find it incredibly offensive.  Bonnie will probably say "Oh my GOSH!  That tastes like Red Hook used to!" ;)

So- where did we go wrong?  That is the question.

The porter- I'll have to look closer at that. It's SO gross, I have no idea.  Infection?

Centennial ale- I should have let it sit longer in the fermenter.  It was a high gravity beer and though it "finished fermentation" quickly, I should have let it sit for another week for the yeast to clean up after themselves.  Yeast are the source of diacetyl in beer.  They will create diacetyl when fermentation temperatures are inconsistant.  They will create diacetyl just BEACUSE.  It happens.  However, if they are allowed to sit with the beer long enough, the same yeast will "scrub" the beer of that diacetyl.

It was a "me day"

OK, the wife is out of town.  I spent Saturday playing with the kids, watching kid movies on the couch, and goofing around with them.

Sunday is my day :)

I woke up at 9 AM and got to brewing around 10:30.  I decided to do the single hop beers for my upcoming brew class

In order to give a bit more complexity to the beer, I ran off the first gallon of wort ( 50% 2-row, 50% Golden Promise) and reduced it to 1/2.  This will introduce kettle caramelization to the beer which should be a nice flavor.  I didn't want to much up the hops by getting a bunch of malts in there.

At the same time, I bottled the Centennial Beer,

When that was finished, we went to a function for some friends.  More on that later...

After returning home, I decided to brew a Belgian blonde ale for a client of mine whose wedding we are catering.  I haven't even told them I'm doing it, but - they like craft beer and specifically mentioned Belgians.

At the same time, I bottled that porter I had in the fermenter.

The entire time I watched Game of Thrones to get ready for my GoT brew, pending my decision on what to do with it.

Damn fine day :)

New Years Pontifications

I brewed on New Year's Day again this year.  It was the one year anniversary of brewing on Megan Fox.  What a special moment :D

My recent brewing obsession is: Solar Brewing

I figure if I'm NOT using solar, I'm kinda being a jerk.  We have free energy out there to be used, why use fossil fuels?

I need to build a box-oven big enough to hold a 5 gallon bucket of water.  Actually, I'd rather build one big enough to hold 2, but I think there is a loss of efficiency when you take the mass of the contents of the oven and divide it by the surface area of the glass.

I may even need to make a solar oven with a shelf so I can split the 5 gallons into 2, smaller quantities.

The theory is that if I leave the water in the oven in the morning, I will have strike water in the afternoon when I come home from work.  This is similar to how I brew now- the timer heating up the coffee pots of water, except without the electricity.

For the boil, I need to get a Fresnel lens and mount it in a frame.  Then I can paint the side of a pot black with hi-temp paint, and hopefully boil-away.

The thing about solar is this- there aren't a lot of resources when it comes to brewing.  I mean, I do know that brewing is just like cooking, and solar cooking is well documented.  The thing is, there is very little documentation regarding BOILING things with solar.  Plenty about how easy it is to cook with solar, parabolic ovens, box ovens, etc etc.  Boiling- not so much.

Using a Fresnel lens will heat the SPOT the beam touches, to a very high temperature.  The problem is, this is a very localized reaction.  That is to say- the heat is a pinpoint on the pot.  This does not lend itself for very effective heating of a 7 gallon volume of wort.  If it were a 1 gallon volume, sure- boom!  But 7 gallons is a lot of thermal mass to bring up to temperature.

So- this is my new obsession.  SO excited!