I have started brewing a little more regularly lately.  Now that the weather is cooling off finally, I have several brews planned before the year taps out.  While pulling gear in and out of crates and bins I keep stumbling and moving back and moving back and forth boxes of brewing magazines and books.  I started to look through some of the books during the mash of my last brew session.  I found a couple great books that I used to really admire.  I thought I would put them here for show.

Now, everyone always talks about Palmer’s “How to Brew” and Jamil’s “Brewing Classic Styles“.  Ray Daniels “Designing Great Beers” is a favorite too for anyone that has a few years of brewing under their belt.  However, these books may be ones that you haven’t seen, but if you have them let us know.  I wonder if anyone else references these books are part of their growth process as a brewer.  Anyway, check these out.

“The Brew Masters’s Bible” Stephen Snyder.  This book is a great book with simple recipes for inspiration.  The main reason I really like it is that its filled with good tables and reference charts.  It has recipes compiled form many , many homebrew shops all over the country.  Its a little dated, but the reference material is still valuable.

“The Homebrewers Recipe Guide” Higgins, Kilgore and Hertlein.  This book is full of recipes, as the name implies.  Many of the recipes are extract bases, but each covered style section ends with a handful of all grain recipes too.  The book covers converting to from extract to all grain.  It also has many little highlight sections with tips on things like bottling, aeration, fruit additions and more.  I like to flip through this book when I am looking for inspiration on what to brew next.

I present these as just some option if you are browsing for a new brewing book sometime and you want something different than the big three I mentioned above.

BREW ON!

Continuing the series of posts for converting from bottling to kegging your homebrewed beer, here is a post discussing the cornelius or corny keg.

The major piece of equipment you need to buy if you want to starting kegging your homebrew is a keg. Corny kegs, which were made for sodas, work well for homebrewers since they typically hold 5 gallons, are easy to clean and sanitize, and their size and shape is conducive to easy storing in a refrigerator.

It’s probably worth mentioning that before you starting thinking about kegging homebrew, you should have a place to store your beer at cold serving temperatures. If you have a beer fridge, then you are all set.

There are two kinds of corny kegs – ones with pin lock connectors (made by Coca Cola) and ones with ball lock connectors (made by Pepsi). Both can be used for homebrew but they are not interchangable. I usually see ball lock corny kegs for sale.

Now you can buy new ones but if you want to save some money, you can find refurbished ones that work just as well as new. I have seen homebrew stores sell both new and used corny kegs. You can find corny kegs for sale on Craigslist too. Mike suggested that if a restaurant has gone out of business, you may be able to get corny kegs from there.

One last thing about corny kegs – I have seen new 2.5 gallon corny kegs and they are just a little less expensive than new 5 gallon ones. To me, the price doesn’t justify the halved amount of volume. You’re probably better off getting a 5 gallon one if you are starting your kegging homebrew journey.

I have been kegging my beer for about 8 years. I kicked the bottling habit and never looked back. Time and convenience are the top priority in my brew house these days (especially with two little ones to chase around). I greatly appreciate the process of cleaning out one big bottle instead of 50 or so small ones. Because kegs are sealable, I can clean sanitize and seal it up until I am ready to use it. Unlike bottles where I prefer to sanitize them the night I bottle. And there is nothing better than heading out to the garage with my favorite stein, snifter, mug, pint glass or bucket at the end of a hard day and pour a draft beer. Perfectly carbonated to your own preferences, crystal clear and cold. Not to mention after you drink a bucket worth of beer you can go back for a half bucket if you need just a little more to top yourself off. I always felt like it was a waste to open another 22oz beer when I only really wanted a couple more sips to wash down that last slice of pizza.

OK, I am making myself thirsty…where’s that bucket?

John and I are going to cover a series of posts on making the move from bottling to kegging. John is still a devoted bottler. But even he is starting to crave that convenience of one big stainless bottle. We are going to cover the basic equipment, carbonation levels, balancing your system and even adapting a chest freezer to a kegerator. We’ll going to walk through all the parts and the process.

And of-course we’ll have to pour a couple pints along the way too.

BREW ON!

Related Posts:

Corny Keg For Homebrewing

CO2 Regulators and Tanks for Homebrewing

So I finally got around to making my mighty yeast starter for the Rauchbier last night.

I carefully measured out the dried malt extract, the water, and the yeast nurtient.

I washed and sanitized my fermenter to make sure there were no remnants of the Saison yeast.

I boiled the wort for 15 minutes total after placing my wort chiller in the kettle.  

I chilled the wort down to 65°F before I poured it into the fermentation bucket.

Everything went as planned.  Everything happened as I imagined it.  No surprises.

After the wort was safely in the fermentation bucket, I brought it inside my basement to pitch the yeast.

I twisted the cap off of the vial of yeast….and…it spun right out of my hands and into my fermentation bucket.

I didn’t have anything sanitized to pluck it out.  Besides, the wort’s foam obscured my view.  I couldn’t see the cap and I wasn’t about to go looking for it.

I decided to let it be.  I put the lid on the bucket and moved it to a nice dark corner of my basement.

Let’s hope there weren’t too many nasties on the cap. 

I hate being the over-excited homebrewer with a new toy, but I’m an over-excited homebrewer with a new toy.  Now that I have this beer fridge, I want to use it for other purposes that just storing beer.

With one week down in the Irish Red Ale‘s primary fermentation period, I am planning to rack it to a glass carboy and cold condition it for 2 weeks in the fridge.

I have been reading that taking this step will help with the clarity and also will help with the “smoothing” out of the beer. 

I would love split the batch and run an A/B test on the cold conditioning effect on the beer, but I will wait for another time.  I want to get the process down without complicating it further.

I will probably set the fridge temp up to 40°F and let it hang out for 14 days before bottling.  I think the Irish Red will benefit from the additional step.  

With the two week stay in the fridge, I don’t think I will crash the yeast so much that bottle carbonation should be affected.

On Saturday afternoon, we put the old apple press to work.

Our target was 3 gallons of cider for this first attempt.  I read somewhere online that one would need 12.5 lbs of apples to make 1 gallon of cider.  We picked about 40 pounds from the orchard down the street and felt like we had enough.

We started chopping the apples in half and then french fry cutting the halves to get them ready for the press.

After pressing with all our might, we learned that the apples needed to be process even further to get more juice.

We employed a 3 three pronged attack (food processor, stick blender, and regular blender) to prep the apples for more productive pressing! 

The regular blender didn’t work all that well, so we stuck with the food processor and the stick blender.  We turned the 40 lbs of apple fries into mush in no time.

We put them all back into the press and watched the huge flow of cider spill down into the kettle.

I added 2 cups of sugar to the cider and pasteurized it by heating it to 170°F for 20 minutes.  We felt it was our best option to kill any unwanted critters. 

We cooled it in a kiddie pool ice bath, added some pectic enzyme, some yeast nutrient, and two packages of proofed Champagne yeast.    

Sunday morning, it was fermenting like crazy.  We’ll see how it turns out.

Lessons Learned:

Need an apple grinder or some kind of way to mill apples into a nice mush quickly and easily.

Need to fix the bottom of the old press.  There are a few leaks – we had a temporary fix with plastic wrap…but that’s not ideal.

We were only able to press 2.75 gallons of cider.  We may have a larger yield next time, but maybe we should pick a few more pounds of apples.

Some photos:

I emailed Mike a question yesterday and he responded with an answer.  Here’s the correspondence:

Question:  Do you think it would be nuts to use 2 pounds of honey in my Honey Wheat Ale recipe?

Answer:  I brewed a honey ginger beer once several years ago, and it had close to 2lbs of honey in it.  It was OK, but the ginger wasn’t very nice.  It was a kit beer, and it was rather thin because of the huge amount of simple, bodiless sugar from the honey.  But with all-grain you can fix that.  Depends on when you add it.  The later in the process you add it the more flavor you’ll retain.  More importantly, the later you add it in the process, the better success you’ll have driving your final gravity to where you want it.  If you add 2lbs to the boil, your FG may finish higher than expected.  This is because the yeast will feast on the simple sugars from the honey first, then turn to the maltose.  At which point, they will likely be tired out and the %ABV is already on the rise.

The best way to handle large amounts of simple sugars is to add them after about 4 days of primary.  Let the yeast work away at the maltose, then give them simple sugars for dessert.  This way you’ll still get a good FG.

The problem with honey will be getting it into a less viscous state to add to the primary.  You can’t really add too much water to it because your volume limitations in the fermentor.  Normally for Belgian styles requiring sugars (Tripel, Golden Strong) , you can get away with just a half quart to make a simple syrup with raw sugar.  But honey is already pretty “volumous”.
I recommend adding 0.5-1.0lb in the boil, then diluting the second pound in enough water to get it easier to pour for primary.

You’d probably do well to make your base beer a 4 gallon batch at a higher gravity that expected, then add the honey and water mix to get the rest of the volume.  For example,   If you wanted a 5.5 gallon batch of 1.050 beer, I’d make 4.5 gallons of 1.061OG beer.  Ferment that for 4-5days with a good healthy pitch of yeast (no 22oz starter, you’ll want a 1L starter), then pour in 1 gallon of your honey/water mix for a final 5.5 gallon batch. To anticipate to thin a body with 2lb of honey, I’d mash in a little high, say 155-156Fish.

Learn about my plans to add honey to the secondary.