Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

…. on the northeastern front. I brewed a 30 gallon batch of scottish last weekend with Brian, and he did a perfect job of summing up the activities – so I won’t duplicate them here. We used the grant & pump skid to move the wort from mash tun to kettle, and it worked great [...]


Titanic

21Oct08

This weekend my friend Brian and I brewed 20 gallons of an Imperial Amber made mostly with homegrown Zeus, Nugget and Magnum hops. The brew day went pretty well, and presented a good opportunity to test the grant and pump skid control box I’ve been working on. I wish I could say the grant was [...]


Well, I’ve got a few weeks where I know I can’t focus on the electronics portion of my pump skid develoment… The drill press holder for my Dremel is backordererd until sometime in late July, and I just ordered 4 6″x9″ pre-sensitized single-sided PCBs from Allied Electronics that should be arriving on Monday… while I [...]


Highs and Lows

02Jul08

Crazy weekend. We went down to my parents’ retirement home on Lake Gaston in NC this past weekend. I brought down my 2-tap draft box along with a keg of brown porter and a keg of american wheat – both were nearly gone after 3 days. My entire family was there – all 3 sisters [...]


So today I brewed 20 gallons of american pale ale with my friends Heidi and Dave. It was a new pale ale recipe that used Amarillo, Centennial, and Summit hops along with a few different specialty grains for character (Vienna, Carapils and Crystal 40). Things went relatively well – stuck mash, but as soon as [...]


Donna took her welder out for a test drive today. No electrical problems – she arc welded a few test pieces of metal, and is planning on spending more time tonight doing more beads as practice. First order of business after her test run was to get a floor fan or something to blow the [...]


So tonight I finally managed to kick my American Brown keg. Its not that the AB was bad – in fact, its one of my favorite beers. I just knew it was coming close to kicking, and with my upcoming all-grain brewing demonstration at How Do You Brew? on May 4th, I really wanted to [...]


Nothing inspires me to new heights of profanity and violence like the task of delabeling bottles. I loathe it – and were it not a necessary (albiet evil) part of the homebrewing process… *sigh*. So that was today – I cleaned and delabeled 6+ cases of bottles, primarily belgian-style 750mL ones. Most of them came [...]


OK. Here’s the truth. To date, I have brewed 3 really awful tripels. I sit here right now drinking the 4th glass of my latest (and first all-grain tripel), brewed 18 months ago in July 2006… and not drinking it like “oh, this is good stuff”… I am serious when I say that I drink [...]


Over the past week (and actually starting during the Xmas vacation), I have done alot of thinking about how my homebrewing obsession has progressed for the past few years and where I want it to go during this year. I find it useful to pen a couple broad goals to help direct my brewing activities, [...]