I checked the specific gravity of the mead and beer tonight and the alcohol content of the mead is about 9.9% and the beer only changed a little bit since the last time I checked and it is between 4.2% and 4.4%.

The beer hasn't changed much because the fermentation really slowed down after I checked it last and I didn't add more yeast until just a few days ago on Friday. It took a couple days for the yeast to really get going again. Because of the way the beer is bubbling now I think it should be ready for bottling by this weekend.

You have to sanitize everything that comes into contact with your beer. The easiest way is to mix up five gallons of iodine solution in the fermenter and throw all of your equipment in there. That works great for most of my stuff but there are a few things that stick up well above the top of the bucket. Also on nights like tonight when I just need my thief and hydrometer it is wasteful to mix up a full five gallons of solution, but the thief is one of the long things that stick out over the top of the bucket.

Well I had a brainstorm and came up with the perfect solution. I went to the hardware store and bought one of those plastic troughs you use to wet wallpaper rolls. It cost $3 and one gallon of iodophor solution is the perfect amount to adequately cover everything. Here is a picture of it in action.



The thief is in the trough being sanitized and it is what I use to pull a sample out of the carboys for testing.

On the counter next to the trough is a racking cane. I don't use it because I bought an autosiphon, but the cane came with the bottle filler so I keep it just in case.

The next thing on the counter is the autosiphon. This is a racking cane inside of a tube with an airtight seal between the two. You pull the racking cane out and then push it back in and it automatically starts your siphon going. You don't have to suck on the end of the tube to get it going and contaminate things. HIGHLY recommended.

The last item is a food grade high temperature plastic stirring paddles for stirring the wort in the brew kettle.

I took this picture a couple weeks ago after I racked the beer from the primary fermenter to the carboy. The stuff in the bottom are the dissolved hop pellets and yeast hulls. The tube is the autosiphon with the flexible tubing attached to it and is of course what I used for the transfer.

Here is a picture of our mead and ale fermenting. The mead is in the carboy on the left and ale is on the right.



Notice the clarity of the mead. Last Wednesday I went downstairs to check on it and it still looked like lemonade. Completely opaque. I went downstairs on Friday and it was totally clarified! What a surprise. They have both been fermenting for three weeks. The beer is probably a little over 4% alcohol and when we checked the mead a week ago it was 8%, but the as vigorously as it has been fermenting I'll bet it could be over 10% now. I plan to check both within the next few days.

I didn't think a movie from my digital camera would have enough light or resolution to show the massive amounts of tiny bubbles that continuously rise to the surface day and night, but you can actually see it pretty well. The sound in the background is the air conditioner running. The mead is actually pretty quiet. At the end you can see a bubble of gas escaping in the air lock at the top.

I racked my beer again yesterday and checked the specific gravity. It went down only another point in the last week, but it tastes really good. It will still be very drinkable, just not as high of an alcohol content as it is supposed too. Actually that might make it a good summer beer! It is still around 4% ABV. I plan on bottling it next weekend. I think I am going to put a little yeast nutrient and yeast energizer in the fermenter today to see if that might help things along a bit.

We also racked our mead and checked its SG. It is at about 8% alcohol now! We drank the 6 ounce sample we needed to check the SG and it was so good we pulled another glass to drink. If it tastes that good now I think it will be amazing in a few months. It has a beautiful light straw color. We used Champaign yeast because we wanted a dry wine rather than a sweet one, and the Champaign taste is coming through nicely. We were going to make half of this batch still and half sparkling, but we think we might make it all sparkling now. Still not 100% sure yet, but that's what makes it fun.

After we took care of our 10 gallons of deliciousness we took the Two Brother's Brewery tour. I've done it once before with my parents but Amy had not taken it. Afterwards we were sitting in the tap house and I was trying a Cane & Ebel and think I have fallen in love with Simcoe hops. They are a fairly new variety introduced in 2000. I haven't seen them at my local homebrew shop and I think right now they are available mostly to commercial brewers. If I can't find them for my next batch I think I will try Cascade hops because I have read people describe Simcoe hops as Cascade on steroids.

The brewery also has a homebrew shop and I picked up 3.3 pounds of amber liquid malt extract for my next batch of beer and Amy got a large can of sterilized peach puree for an upcoming batch of mead. I think for the other half of the malt in my next beer I will use a powdered malt extract, but I don't know if I want that to be an amber or a light. I still have to do some more research. I am thinking about buying a little bit more than I need for the batch and use the extra as priming sugar rather than corn sugar.

If you describe the homebrew process to somebody it sounds like a lot of work and complexity, and it is if you had to do it all at one time. But because brewing and racking and bottling all happen on different days separated each by several weeks it is really not that bad. I actually look forward to each process. Each process takes about two hours from start to finish. Brew day probably takes a little longer because you have to boil your wort for one hour, but that is more just relaxing than actually working.

I had to go into work today for a little bit to check on a database that had been updated yesterday, and Amy is in Kansas to see a patient for the day. I am going to start some laundry, put away some brewing gear from yesterday, and do some puttering yard work. Don't know if I will cut the grass, but I plan on at least spraying and/or digging some weeds, pick up dog poop, light pruning, and maybe organize the garage a little bit. My aquarium has not had a partial water change in WAY too long. I should do that today too. Oh yeah, a bike ride would also be a good idea. The weather here is perfect today.

Just got back from a 9.8 mile bike ride. Had a Smithwick's and a Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA (I'm feeling good!) I'm going to take a shower and then check the specific gravity of the beer we brewed last week. I did two things wrong with it. 1) I did not aerate the wort and 2) pitched the yeast while the wort was too warm. The first day the airlock was bubbling almost continuously. After that it was bubbling about every 3 minutes or 3.5 minutes which I think seems on the slow side. I think it stopped bubbling today. Checking the specific gravity will tell me how far along it is to being beer. I might be surprised and it is already beer. It could go either way. We'll see.

I got this clipping in the mail today from my Dad. I HAVE to try this place. Any restaurant that boasts multiple menu items with "1 pound of bacon" in the same ad has to be good, right?


click on image to enlarge

Last week I went for a 9.7 mile bike ride and tonight I rode for 11.7 miles. My legs could have gone more, but my butt was getting saddle-sore.

Today Mitch is a big boy and is 5 years old! In honor of his birthday I thought I would post a video of him I took a few weeks ago but never got around to posting.

I was trying to get him riled up to play by making growling sounds and thumping the bed. It works sometimes, but this time all he did was stick his tongue out of the side of his mouth. I was laughing so hard I couldn't keep the camera steady.



My beer was going gangbusters the first day, but today it slowed to a bubble every 30 to 40 seconds. I did some looking on some homebrew forums and it might be because I did not aerate the wort enough before I pitched the yeast. I also added the yeast when the wort was possible too warm. You are supposed to get the temperature down close to 70 degrees, but I added it when it was 105 degrees. I hope to rack it to a carboy Friday are Saturday. I think I read somewhere that doing that can sometimes give the yeast a little nudge to start working again. I will also measure the specific gravity again to see how far along it is. (i.e. how much of the sugars have been converted to alcohol)

We made our first batch of beer today and a batch of mead! The process was a lot of fun and I think I am going to like periodically spending an afternoon on the patio mixing up 5 gallons of beer.

The video below is just a couple minutes after we put the bag of specialty malt (crystal malt) into 2 gallons of water in the brew kettle. We kept it the water between 160 and 170 degrees for 20 minutes. I was surprised how quickly it colored the water and how dark it made the water.



This is a picture of the muslin bag of grain after it was done steeping with a hole cut in it to see what it looks like. We tried a few bites of it and tt was like really fibrous oatmeal. Click on the picture to see a larger image.



After we removed the malt bag we turned off the burner and added two cans of liquid malt extract and the bittering hops. The heat gets turned off so the clumps of the syrupy malt extract that fall to the bottom do not burn. Once we completely stirred it into the liquid we turned the heat back on, brought it to a boil, and kept it boiling for 55 minutes. After 55 minutes we add the finishing hops and boiled for an additional 5 minutes.

We had a clean 7.9 gallon fermenter with 2 gallons of water that sat out overnight so the chlorine could evaporate off. We poured the wort (that is what is in the kettle now) into the fermenter, and then added additional water to bring the total volume to 5 gallons. The original gravity is 1.045. That is a measure of how much sugar is in the water. As it gets consumed by the yeast and turned to alcohol the specific gravity will drop. Subtracting the final gravity from the original gravity and plugging it into a formula will tell you how much alcohol is in the beer.

Once the wort had cooled to 105 degrees I added the yeast and put the lid on and inserted the air lock. Below is a video just a couple hours after I sealed it up and carried it to the basement. I apparently have some really happy yeast at work in there!



After about a week I will use a siphon to transfer the beer from the primary fermenter to a large glass jug called a carboy. This will clarify the beer because I will keep the tip of the siphon just a little bit above the sediment that will have settled to the bottom. I might do this once or twice more before I finally bottle it in two or three weeks. I will get a little clearer each time I do that.

I have taken it upon myself to make it my life's work to get people to understand dew point rather than the more commonly used, but less useful to most, relative humidity. I have written before that all you need to know when listening to the weather report is that a dew point of 65 degrees or higher means high humidity and will be uncomfortable. The lower the dew point is, the dryer the air is. Today I am going to show you how useless it is for the average person to know what the relative humidity is.

The chart below charts out, from top to bottom, temperature, dew point and relative humidity. Relative humidity is a function of temperature, so notice that the temperature line (top) and relative humidity line (bottom) move in an almost perfect mirror pattern. But notice the dew point stays unchanged.


I grabbed this screen shot from the NOAA website a couple of years ago when we were going through a long hot and humid spell.

At night time (the lightly shaded area) the relative humidity shoots up to 89%, but during the day it drops to 43%. But it is not any less humid during the day, and it is just as uncomfortable as during the night. That is because relative humidity is not directly measuring how much actual moisture is in the air. It is telling you how much more moisture you can add to the air at a given temperature. Really useful to you, isn't it?

The dew point is a direct measure of how much moisture is in the air. It is not dependant on temperature and will not fluctuate when the temperature changes, only when the moisture content of the air changes.

I went to the local homebrew shop today to check things out. They have a couple beginners equipment kits, but I think there are some things in there that I don't think I would use, so I worked up a list of the things I would want and priced it out. I asked if he would give me a discount because I was buying everything all at once and he said sure. The prices below are pre-discount. I think he might have put down the wrong prices for the pail and lid because those seem a little expensive. We also forgot to add a stopper for the carboy and fermentation air locks, but those are just a couple dollars each. I didn't buy anything today because Amy wanted to be there when we buy everything, so I will wait until she is back from California visiting her mom.

Glass carboy - 6.5 gallons	29.50
fermenting pail – 6.5 gallons	15.90
pail lid	5.69
auto siphon	10.20
bottling siphon	9.90
hydrometer	6.20
bottle sterilizer	14.65
45-bottle drying tree	29.00
capper	16.95
Stainless steel brew kettle - 5 gallons	32.50
Total	170.49

They had a bunch of ingredient kits too I looked over. I think my first one will be an American pale ale. I plan on doing a couple kits first before I try an all-grain batch. He gave me a sample of a double Belgian ale they made in the store and it was delicious. It was not from a kit, but it was not an all grain batch. It was a recipe they made using powdered malts and malt extracts. That might be a good intermediate to do between the kits and an all grain batch. I could be a little creative and pick the varieties of hops I want to use, maybe use some specialty malts, etc.

I went to Gordon's Food Service today and got 5 pounds of cocoa powder. Every morning I put a scoop in the soy protein drink I invented and it is cheaper to buy it this way rather than the 1 pound cans in the grocery store.

I went to performance bike after than and bought a chain cleaner, some chain cleaner fluid, and some Teflon chain lubricant.

Then I went to the homebrew shop as detailed above, and then because I was in the neighborhood I went to Farm and Fleet for no reason other than to walk around. I ended up getting hound food for Mitch, a rat trap, a solar powered LED dragonfly for the garden, and a Diet Coke, jerky and sesame sticks for the car because up to that point (3 PM) I only had coffee, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a beer sample and was a little beyond hungry.

After an afternoon of thinking about beer I really want to go have one, but I think I am going to cut the grass first and maybe take Mitch to the dog park or a walk around the neighborhood. If I had a beer now I probably wouldn't get to grass cutting next.

I also might have to take another video of me pouring a beer for my smartass brother in law, albeit probably not a homebrew one.

Five weeks ago we started our first batch of beer. A week ago we went back to the shop and bottled it. They said it would be ready after conditioning in the bottles for two weeks. Well I couldn't wait and tried one tonight after just one week. I was amazed at how much carbonation there was. I kind of expected it to be half flat.



I shot a video of me pouring it so you could see how much carbonation there was. In the video I say it has fermented four months. I meant four weeks. And it was delicious. I think I am going to the local homebrew shop tomorrow and buying my brewing gear.

Yesterday afternoon we went back and bottled our beer. We had a taste of it directly from the fermenter, not chilled and not carbonated, and even like that it was fabulous! They drew off one bottle worth and charged just that bottle with their CO2 system and chilled it while we were bottling. When we tasted it that way it was even more amazing. Maybe one of the best beers I have had.

We started out by disinfecting our bottles. They had a little basin that held an iodine solution with a little push activated squirter in the center. You put the bottle on top of the squirter and push down three or four times. With each push it squirts the iodine solution into the bottle. They have a special rack that holds the bottles upside down so the excess solution and drain out. In the picture below you can see Amy using the disinfector. The red thing with all the bottles hanging off it is obviously the drip dry rack.



The picture below is 5 gallons of our beloved beer in a 6 or 6.5 gallon carboy. There is flexible plastic hose already inserted to use as a siphon for bottling. There is a stiff plastic tube attached to the hose with a little valve at the very bottom. You stick the tube all the way into the bottle. When the little valve hits the bottom of the bottle the beer starts flowing. Lift up the tube and the beer stops. Very clever! You fill it up right to the very top. When you pull the tube out of the bottle the level of beer falls and leaves the perfect amount of head space in the bottle. I think I like bottling that way better than opening and closing a spigot on a bottling bucket.



In the lower left corner of the picture you can see a little plastic bag with white stuff inside. That is priming sugar used. We took a couple cups of beer and microwaved it and then stirred the sugar in and then added it back to the carboy. Warming the beer just makes it easier to dissolve the sugar. This sugar will be totally consumed by the still-living yeast and converted to CO2 to carbonate the beer and will not add sweetness to it.

We took home 50 bottles. We would have had 52 but we drank one there and broke one while bottling. Right now they are sitting in my basement at about 69 degrees and should be ready to drink in about two weeks.

From what I've read online as the beer ages after the two week period the bubbles will get finer and finer and the flavors will improve and mesh even more. They recommended, especially for beginners. To have one beer a week and pay attention to how it changes over time.

The beer was so good, and it is kind of fun and cool to do, I think I am going to buy some gear and try making some myself.

I think I mentioned in a previous post that Amy got me a two-session beer making class. Well yesterday was class one. It was a blast and I think I want to eventually give it a try myself at home.

We started off meeting a couple of her friends, Jed and Cindy, for breakfast at 9 AM that live near the beer place. They were really nice and I enjoyed their company.

The class started at 11 AM and it was just a few blocks from where we had breakfast.



It was supposed to be us and another couple, but the other couple didn't show up so it was just us. I liked that because we got more personalized attention.

He poured us different types of beer to sample throughout the class. We also sampled three types of mead which I was excited to try. It was delicious! I always thought it was like sweet beer. It is actually just fermented honey. Surprisingly it tastes most similar to a white wine. He uses locally harvested honey which is neat. We could pick up on the florals, some pine, and various spicy notes. Whatever the bees foraged on really came out in the end result. Much more so than you can taste in just straight honey.

The instructor started soaking some barely malt and then cooking it around 6:30 in the morning. This is Amy stirring it after we dropped a satchel of crystal malt into it.



Here we have transferred the fresh malt from the kettle into the fermenter and are adding some canned malt. We added a can of hopped malt and a can of unhopped malt. He also added some hops to the mash in the kettle early in the morning.



These are the two cans of malt we added, the satchel of crystal malt, the vial of yeast, and the package of finishing hops we added to the fermenter right before we sealed it up.



The blue barrel is just city tap water that the instructor pulled the day before and let it sit so the chlorine could escape.



The orange tub on the table is where he first soaked the barley malt in the morning. The black thing on the table behind it is the kettle where he cooked the mash after it soaked for a while. He cooked it at 180 degrees.



We will go back in about three weeks to bottle the beer and take it home. At that time we can adjust the beer if it is too hoppy, not hoppy enough, adjust the specific gravity etc. He said a lot of home brewers don't adjust their beer before they bottle it and said you miss the opportunity to make a really good beer by skipping this step.

We will also add some corn sugar before we bottle it. This is how you carbonate the beer. It gives the yeast an easily digestible food source which results in lots of carbon dioxide. He said they use corn sugar rather than table sugar because the latter can give your beer an off taste.

I think I could see myself doing it at home. You don't need nearly as much expensive equipment as I thought:

A five gallon bucket to use as a fermenter with an airtight lid and a water valve on top to let the excess gases out and keep bacteria from getting in.

A kettle to cook the mash and a turkey fryer burner. I have the burner, but I would probably want to use a kettle that hasn't been used for anything else.

A hydrometer to check specific gravity.

A bottle capper.

Some siphon tubing.

That's it! I have a friend that does a little home brewing who said I could borrow his gear before I invest in my own.

It has been WAY too long since I have posted here. I have a lot to catch up on, so for now I think I will just do a summary to get back in the groove.

Probably the biggest thing is I was in Florida the last week of March for a much needed family vacation. Mom, Dad, Sister, bro-in-law, niece and nephew all shared a really nice condo right on the beach! It was a long, tough, and cold winter and a week in Florida really recharged my batteries. I have pictures and some videos I will post later.

For my birthday Amy got me a really neat gift: a two-session beer making class! Here are the details:

We'll cover all major aspects of brewing in this two-session class. In the first session you will brew a 6-gallon batch using the latest brewing techniques that truly produce a quality brew. Beer will ferment in our temperature-controlled cellar for 2 to 3 weeks. When ready, you choose a date to come in for the second session and bottle 50 to 60 bottles of your beer. We have many beer styles to choose from.

First Session:
•Factors that make quality beer
•In depth discussion on brewing ingredients
•Brewing techniques
•Hands-on brewing
•How to evaluate quality beer

Second Session:
•Bottling techniques
•Bottling your beer
(You can bring in your own bottles or purchase new ones for $10.95 per case (24 bottles)
•Capping your beer
•Beer storage
•Beer labeling. Label paper is $9.95 for 32 labels. You can customize a label design for a $45.00 set-up fee and 35 cents per label, or have one designed specially for you (quotes upon request)
•(Optional) Brew another batch.

You can choose any kind of beer you want to make. Because of this I have been researching and sampling different kinds of beer lately. Because of this I think I have decided my favorite kind of beer is pale ale.

Side note: beer can be divided into two types, lager and ale. The kind of yeast lager uses needs cooler temperatures and therefore longer brewing times and the yeast lives at the bottom of the brewing vessel. Ale yeast needs warmer temperature, shorter brew times, and lives at the top of the brewing vessel. I am probably overly generalizing, but lagers are milder and ales have a more complex taste. I am sure I will be writing more about this as I learn more.

I got another off-leash permit for Mitch this year for the county's dog parks. I have taken him there a few times after work. It really tires him out. I usually make him wear a muzzle, not because he is aggressive towards other dogs or people, but because if I don't, he won't play but will scavenge for poop and grass to eat. The part that sucks is that people think he is aggressive or a bad dog when they see the muzzle. Maybe I will get a vest for him that says something like "The muzzle is just to keep me from eating poop."

(It's surprising how much easier the words flow with some Goose Island Honker's Ale in me!)

I just bought an 80 megabyte Zune MP3 player this week and love it. I ordered it from Amazon Tuesday morning and opted for the free Super Saver shipping option. The initial estimate was that I would receive it on May 9 which is 19 days. I received it in two days on Thursday! I downloaded and installed the Zune software before it arrived and set up a bunch of podcasts I wanted to subscribe to. When it arrived I was syncing the music, podcasts, and updating the firmware within 4 minutes (literally) of opening it up. It has built-in WiFi and I was able to set that up with my encrypted connection without reading the instructions in just a couple minutes. I can synch the latest podcasts anywhere in the house without the need to plug a cable into player. Neat!

Went to the doctor again this morning to get another shot of cortisone in my elbow for tendonitis.

I need to cut the grass today.

I am doing the neighborhood newsletter for a couple months while the woman that normally does it is on maternity leave. I am actually writing this post in order to procrastinate from working on it.

I use spoons a lot in the kitchen. One to stir the coffee grounds after I pour the water into the French press. One for my cereal. When I am cooking I will grab a spoon for tasting. Etc. It seemed that I was always running out of teaspoons. Amy had a great idea from watching a chef on one of the Food Network shows. I went to Wal-Mart and bought 4 packs of cheap teaspoons ($1 per pack) for a total of 24 spoons and keep them in an upright container next to the stove. Now I can grab a clean spoon without worrying if I am running out! Genius.

This is the great hand-drawn Valentine's I got in the mail today from my 7 year old nephew.

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I snapped this right outside my front door tonight after work.