Rocky Island

A group of friends brewing beer at home

[rockyislandbrewery]

Party

Hi I'm on a party and Guess what? I'm not drunk yet xD or???

[rockyislandbrewery]

[techinsider]

7 of the biggest myths about beer debunked

We got in touch with Sheri Jewhurst and Xavier Jirau, respectively the “dictator” and scientific advisor for Brooklyn homebrew club The Brewminaries, to find the truth about some of the most common myths about beer.

[hoppedupredhead]

I’m reblogging these more for the awesome graphics than the info

[qhrumphf-deactivated20180312]

For once one of those “things you should know about beer” that’s actually 100% accurate. Whodathunkit.

Cheers!

[rockyislandbrewery]

Bad beer... crap!

Was going to bottle a batch of IPA on Sunday, turned out it had gone bad during secondary! Sucks! When we opened the lid there was a layer of white “gunk” floating around, however the smell was really good so we had hopes of getting some of the beer salvaged. Started siphoning it to the bottling bucket and thought for my self “hmm, I think it could be a good idea to taste it before we put any sort of labour in to it”... it turned out it was a good idea! Even though the smell was great, the taste was equally awful! Down the drain it went and new ingredients are about to get ordered home for a new batch.

Gunky junky:

The whole thing sucked extra much since it was a batch for one of my friends that really enjoyed the IPA. Had to call him and say that the beer will be delayed. The good news however is that the brown ale we made is AWESOME! I really loved it! It has now been bottle aged for soon two months. When I tried it earlier on it wasn’t really that good, i was disappointed and started thinking about how to make it better. Well, just some simple aging did the trick! Me and my friend both enjoyed it. We can still make it better, but to start with it was good. 

Next brewery will be a “double-batch mayhem”... or not really... a new IPA for my friend and an APA for myself (the APA is the best recipe I have made thus far). The APA was my second recipe* and I had this one beer in mind when making the recipe. However I can’t say it was skill that made it the great success it was, but mostly luck... I think. In the picture below we have our own APA and the store bought APA side-by-side... what bothers me is that I no longer can tell which glass contained what beer. I think the left one is home-brew 

Home brewed APA vs. Keisari Route 66 APA:

*When I started home brewing I didn’t go with extract, I started all-grain without any experience what-so-ever. Also I din’t start with a finished recipe, nope, I just HAD to have my own... without knowing much about anything... grain, hops or yeast. My first recipe was a weissbier... or more like a dunkel weissen since it was dark and more... dunkel than a normal weiss. My second recipe as stated above was the APA. I had tried the Keisari Route 66 APA made by Finnish Nokian panimo and I liked it so I decided to make something like that one. 

I put some sort of recipe together, tried to think about color and so on but din’t really have a clear idea of how to get flavor, bitterness, aroma, color etc. so I simply just winged it. When it had been aging for a couple of weeks on bottle me and a friend thought that we would make a side-by-side comparison of our own beer vs the store bought beer. To our surprise they looked and poured exactly the same! That was a moment of pride for me and right there I was totally hooked. Well, we still had to se how the taste was compared to the “66″. And to add to our surprise, it was BETTER! It had the same body, same carbonation, same bitterness BUT the hop aroma was astronomically better! So my first “clone” recipe was a great success! I never had any intention cloning the “66″ but I had every intention to make something similar and great tasting, in that I succeeded. Since that I haven’t tried the recipe again (mostly because I have about 20 different recipes we have been trying out) but now it is time to see if we can make the same beer again.

[rockyislandbrewery]

Fina saker! #siperia #plevna #gott #namu #finnishcraftbeer

[rockyislandbrewery]

How To Make Stir Fry http://9gag.com/gag/aKqPgm1?ref=mobile

[beeranyone]

[qhrumphf-deactivated20180312]

BrewDog’s take on the mega brewers buying the craft guys (Breckenridge the latest to fall).

I’m not wild about the BrewDog beers I’ve had (they’ve been alright but nothing special), but I admire their zeal.

That and “nailing our colours to the motherfucking mast” is about as good of a vow as I’ve heard from a craft brewer.

Although Tony Magee said something similar.

[laymansbeer]

The Periodic Table of Beer Styles on Amazon. Designed by Mantis Design. We’ve got a few nice beer posters up at home, but this one is as functional as it is geeky. Not only can one easily see the relationship between different styles of beer but they also have detailed information like range of ABV, IBU, even original gravity and final gravity. A great wall hanging for beer geeks, home-brewers, and newbies alike.

[rockyislandbrewery]

All I want for christmas is this!

[hypobrew]

In case you wanted to know what 30 gallons of #homebrew beer looks like in bottles. #holiday6pack

[rockyislandbrewery]

I want!

[rockyislandbrewery]

#gott me #bollaböukon

[rockyislandbrewery]

So. Much. Work

It has been a busy fall. Got a new job in August and after that I’ve had almost no time to brew. In the last 6 months I’ve only made two beers (both during the same weekend) and now I’m waiting for it to get ready to drink. Well, one of them at least. The other one is on secondary and I should bottle it sometime this week. My new years resolution for 2016 will be to brew more and better! 

When me and my friends have brewed we have always tried out a new recipe. Never brewed the same recipe twice and in a way it has been great, but also I’d like to tweek my recipes to perfection AND try to get good, consistent beer. Starting next year, I’ll brew ONE recipe until I get everything in the recipe dialed down and can repeat the same beer time after time. After that I’ll move on to the next recipe.

[rockyislandbrewery]

I just had to test the Brown Ale that we bottled on Sunday. Yes, it is too soon. Yes, it was GOOD! Just some waiting and it will be awesome… still not much carbonation (duh) but enough to be drinkable… now patience:)

[stonebrewing]

Due to a late-to-be-discovered leaky gasket, our first batch of #StoneIPA from our Stone Brewing Berlin 10hl transformed. The results: delicious! Stone Busted Gasket IPA is a one-time only Session IPA with 4.1% ABV and 9.5 OG. We’ll be tapping limited kegs at 18.00 CET in select venues during our premiere of event on the 7th of December: http://fal.cn/Kshy http://fal.cn/Ksh4 img: @wurstack

[qhrumphf-deactivated20180312]

Because sometimes it happens to the pros too.

[fermentoloaf]

The Stir Pot

There is a reason I have been brewing for three years and have not bought a stir plate yet.  Actually, there are two reasons.  The first one is that I’m cheap.  The second one is that I don’t really like the design of stir plates on the market, or rather, I don’t like the lack of design of stir plates on the market.  They are all adapted from laboratory equipment, and even though some hacks are very nice, such as using a CPU fan with magnets glued on, I still didn’t like the overall concept.  First of all, I wondered what happens when the stir bar loses contact with the magnet, which I’m told, does happen on occasion.  Secondly, I don’t like glassware, as I tend to break it a lot.  Laboratory flasks are really thin-walled Pyrex glass, and I could imagine myself breaking many of them, at $20+ a pop.  And then, everyone covers up their Pyrex beakers with a piece of aluminum foil, and while I’m sure that works great, I wanted a proper lid on my stir device.

So far, I have been making starters in the same cheap stainless steel 1 gallon pot.  I bought this in a set of four from Harbor Freight.  It was $20 for the entire set. I have been boiling my starter wort in this pot, and then swishing it around manually for the last year.  I wanted to adapt this same pot for automated stirring.  I am really set in my ways, so I refuse to stop making starters in this cheap stainless pot.

So I bought a 12VDC gearmotor on Ebay for $4.99 shipped.  It did take a while to get here, admittedly.  Then I got a 12VDC power supply ($4.99 shipped,) and an 8MM coupling ($1.99 shipped.)  Then I bought a skinny stainless steel spoon from the Asian grocery store.  It was $2.99 in a set with stainless steel chopsticks.  The skinny shape is important, as Korean rice/soup spoons have this shape.

I cut the spoon with a Dremel tool and drilled a hole in the pot lid with a step drill bit, and wired up my motor.  I stuck the motor to the pot lid with velcro.  Now I can boil my starter wort in the stainless pot, cool it, pitch my yeast, sanitize the spoon, and just put the lid on and plug it in.  It will spin at 300 rpm like a stir plate, only I don’t have to worry about the stir bar losing contact with the magnet, or breaking any glass.

Can’t wait to test this out!

[rockyislandbrewery]

Need to try this!

[rockyislandbrewery]

Yesterday #ipa today #brownale #homebrew #brewing #rockyislandbrown #rockyislandbrewery @kopp_88 @jixxu @theresamari87 (på/i Bergö)

[rockyislandbrewery]

#brewing an #ipa #homebrew #rockyislandipa #rockyislandbrewery (på/i Bergö)