Mountain Life!!
I have been busy getting settled in the mountains. Lots of fun and lots of work. Brewing here has its ups and downs, as you always run into with a new location and setup. I have a lot of fun stuff on the horizon which will help me streamline my home brewing big time. I now have a gas burner and an 8 gallon kettle, although I have not used it yet, and a kegerator on the way!! That will make the boys in the living room very happy indeed!
I have brewed two beers up here now, a Belgian blonde ale, and a Scottish ale. Very excited for both of these brews! The Belgian will be very similar to Leffe, very easy drinking but also flavorful from the Belgian yeast (WLP530 Abbey Ale). The Scottish I just transferred to secondary tonight, it has a very subtle smokey flavor from .2 lbs of peat smoked malt and also an addition of brown sugar. The blonde will be around 7% and the Scottish around 8%. Some advantages of brewing here: VERY cold water for my wort chiller, snow outside for cooling my side boil (although my new burner will eliminate this) and of course very clean fresh water from the tap.
Since my water is so pure here in the mountains, that is lacking mineral deposits, it is necessary for me to make a small addition of bicarbonate to my mash and sparge water when doing darker SRM (Standard Reference Method) brews in order for it to come out as smooth as possible. I use baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). It doesn't take much, for my Scottish ale which has a calculated SRM of 18 I only had to use 5.5g in 6.8 gallons of mash and sparge water. You can read all about this here if you are interested in taking your all grain to the next level.
Normally I would be bottling the blonde now but I am going to wait another 2 weeks for my kegerator, then it will only take 2 days to force carbonate and no time will be lost. I will be posting all about that build as it happens. Plus I can clean all the 5 gallon kegs at work, it will be a significant improvement over bottling.
I had to flush a lot of beautiful American ale yeast (A-56) down the drain at work today, made me very sad. Next time I will be bringing in some jars to bring some home. Working at a brewery is awesome, I am learning a ton and also have tons of resources at my fingertips; yeast, free kegs, and lots of brewer friends, just to name a few. I'll do a post about work sometime soon, it is very cool with our expansion going on.
That is all for tonight, Workaholics is on soon! Beer reviews, kegerator build, and a post about my work all coming soon!