All Grain Setup

Have assembled all of the new All Grain equipment. One 8 gallon brew kettle with ball valve and thermometer, one 5 gallon mash tun, and a home made wort chiller . All set to brew Leffe Brune clone tomorrow.

Belgique IPA

Ingredients all set for brew day. Last extract brew and going to attempt to modify my Damnation Ale IPA, by adding a Belgian style hop and using Trappist yeast. Going with some orange peel in the last few minutes just to give it a more fuity flavour.

Damnation Ale

Okay so first brew was not really that good. Very mild on the taste side and very low on IBU's.

So for brew #2 I have a starting gavity of 1063 and around 109 IBUs (according to brew software). I'm hoping for something far richer in flavour. To try and enhance flavour I started with a couple of pounds of steeped crushed grains (2 row pale & Caramel Crystal). Hop wise I have 2 ounces of leafy Magnum, with 2.5 ounces of centennial, with another 1.75 ounces of centennial for dry hopping. We'll see what happens

Steeping Grains

Finished Wort chilling in ice bath

Complete

It's finally complete, bottle cap popped with a decent escape of gas , lots of bubbles, also poured very clear,. Tastes not bad for my first attempt. I wouldn't pay big money for it, but it does taste like a standard amber ale. Got a slight buzz after a few minutes, so there's alcohol in it, will use the hydrometer on the next bottle to try and calculate the alcohol content.

Also left pretty decent lacing another good sign. Overall I'm happy, my first attempt is not a failure. I got some things wrong in the initial brewing, fortunately I got away with them and have 5 Gallons of not bad beer.

This was essentially from a kit (with a swap of hops), next time will try a recipe using half extract, half specialty grains. Don't yet have access to big enough brew kettle to do a full mash, but it will happen,

Bottling Day

First siphoned the beer from the fermenting bucket via racking cane and tubing into bottling bucket.

Took a small sample. Looks like beer, tastes like beer, must be BEER!!!

Finally all bottled, 2 weeks to wait for final bottle conditioning, and then FREE BEER!!!!

Keeping Cool

The temperature of the fermenting bucket kept rising. The solution I have come up with is wrapping the bucket with a wet towel and indirectly blowing air from a fan to wick away the temperature. It has worked very well the temp has dropped to around 70F, which hopefully will suffice. Bubbling has started to taper off so maybe mid-week I will start bottling!

Bubbles

After more than 12 hours we have bubbles going through the airlock. I didn't have the airlock in tight enough at first, for fear of displacing the o-ring seal. But now its doing its thing, check back in a week.

Brew Day

Boiled the wort, changed the hops to cascade to get that classic American hoppiness to my amber.

 

And finally everything's in the fermenter, though I'm a little worried its hotter than I thought it would be. 

Hoping over night the temp will drop a bit, a couple of degress is all that's needed

Damages Brewery

Its 25 odd years since I last gave everyone alcohol poisoning with my home brewed barley wine (sorry Rich and Nhoj), I figured it's time to give brewing another go.

My basic brewing equipment kit, with amber ingredient recipe just showed up. I've prepped an under utilized closet, and now I'm almost ready go.

May have to buy some extra hops to get the ibu's up a bit though.

....and I dont think Ive enough empty bottles yet, drink!!!!

Les Paul Upgrade

My Standard Les Paul is standard no more, with the addition of a new pin-up custom pickguard

Sunday evening

A good way to round off the weekend with a couple of great beers. One from Blighty and one from the US

S.A.S

So the SAS got caught in Libya today. I don't think they were there to do anything other than protect a diplomat, but WTF are they doing getting caught.

They're supposed to be amongst the best trained forces in the world and they get caught by rebels who a week ago were ordinary civilians.

That's not too impressive now is it?

More Airdam

Nice day at Griffith Park, so used camera for better quality photo of new airdam. Next to upgrade the interior, currently vinyl seats are breaking up and are to hot to sit in during summer heat. No carpet is installed and sound proffing is required to hide 38 year old rattles

Air dam

Ziggy gets a xenon urethane air dam