The TBR Homebrewing thread

oh, and Grid - the Teeter up the road from me carries Utica Club. WTF?

 

you get instantaneous shits when you drink that stuff. you seriously want to strap on four or five pairs of Depends before consuming even on sip of UC.

 

never had it, but its reputation precedes itself. I have absolutely no idea why any store outside of NY would bother trucking that shit down here - I actually kinda laughed. Never seen Genesee down here.

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060952164/026-2985306-9631603

This book was written by one of my best friends at ASU - lived in the next room in Justice Dorm. He lives in Vermont now but was from La Grange in NC.(wherever that is)

He was a cool guy. I need to look him up some time.

 

That's cool. Small world, two people here have known beer authors.

 

Well, we did it. I didn't buy the brew kit, but looking at it, the kits are only useful for their completeness. If you bucket ferment, you can go get the true brew buckets at Wine Warehouse up here for $2. Jake and Josh bought a two stage glass carboy set, a 5 gal and 6.5 gal, and it's in the larger right now.

Did a Witbier, which was our choice because my wife and Jake's girl like it. Was complicated because it's a fairly complex beer for a first run, but most of it was fumbling through as two engineers and a MCSE all balance between being clueless and looking like we knew what we were doing. Sabrina took pictures, we drank a bottle of Chimay Cinq Cents, mocked each other, watched the SB, ate chili, and forgot to take a good sample from the bucket. A sample from the bottom of the bucket gave us an original gravity of only 1.035, don't know if that's relative to where we screwed up taking it late or what, but that's kinda low.

Other than that, it's over in the corner of the dining room bubbling away once every six seconds with two inches of foam over it. Jake was emailing me from work telling me I should get a new batch going when I rack the Wit over to the smaller carboy. I'm considering it.

 

Awesome. Make sure you set a 6 pack away for a year to let it age.

Also, I wouldn't even worry about the SG. I figured out that has got to be about the most worthless thing known to man.

 

bottled yesterday, and brewed an Irish Red while doing it.
People said bottling would be a bastard, but it was easy as hell. It was sanitization that was a pain. We tasted a bit of our uncarbonated beer after our terminal specific gravity reading and I thought it tasted fine, very clear with the flavors I expected, but Jake felt it tasted too "flowery". I didn't really pick it up, but I've tasted beer I felt was too hoppy, and I felt like it really wasn't that bad.

The Red came out about right for specific gravity. It came together a lot quicker and simpler than the Wit, which was probably a bit much for a first beer, but it should keep getting easier. I'm doing the next batch solo.

also, both batches have come with Irish Moss...WTF is that for?

 

May 20th - my house we are brewing and drinking, followed by poker. Who's in?

 

woulda been cool to have seen the setup.


Brewed my 4th batch Sunday afternoon (belgian wit, irish red, ESB, amber). Instead of the ebrew kits (which are awesome), I tried one of the local store's true brew kits, which had mostly liquid, hopped extract (+2 lbs DME). I was curious to see how that worked, with the LME, and I was kinda disappointed. Only one set of hops (Cascades, not marked for being finishing, flavoring, bittering, anything), kinda crappy directions, and first time I haven't used liquid yeast.

This morning it was coming up through the air lock, first time that happened.