latest posts relevant to ‘brewing’

Saturday this weekend was spent in the Focus. we participated in the Spring Run organized by the New England Rally.

the premise is that a bunch of people get together and drive somewhere as a group, have lunch, drive somewhere else as a group, have dinner, drinks, socialize. sounds great. this years course was Rt 1, all the way to Maine.

there was good and bad; i won’t get into the specifics here but a few misunderstandings led to 1/2 the day being unpleasant. all in all it was 15 hours spent mostly in the car, and i don’t know if i can convince my better half to do that again.

Sunday we started out with plans of productivity, and to brew later on in the day. by 1pm i called shenanigans on our intentions of productivity, and we headed to Kettle to Keg for brewing supplies. that afternoon/evening, we brewed a batch of Double Brown Ale as an end-of-tax-season celebration. afterwards, we followed up with a Golden Ale recipe designed to be a drinker and not knock one on their respective sorry butt on a weeknight.

that was the weekend. at some point, we need to look into this ‘relaxation’ we hear people toy with on their 2 day break.

of course you’ll see this in my flickr feed, but i’ll elaborate.

we’ve had the 4-tap kegfridge for quite some time now, even going so far as to have it transported from WA to NH when we moved (is that legal? probably. it was empty at the time).

we were never really happy with our chromed faucets. they quickly chipped, leaving a nasty appearance. also, their traditional design left most of the internal valve mechanism exposed to the room air while in the sealed position. this meant that both they would get sticky and difficult to operate, and that various microorganisms in the room air could waft up the nozzle and take up residence in the aforementioned stickiness.

as a christmas present to ourselves (okay, i ordered them and carrie went along with it) we purchased four Ventmatic faucets. their design is significantly different – a “forward sealing” design which means that they aren’t subject to the standard faucet issues. also, the entire faucet from tail to tip is made from stainless steel.

plus, i think they’re awfully handsome. if i only would have cleaned up the plastic tap handles before taking this shot:

in the longstanding tradition of explaining nonsensical-sounding old english traditions at the holidays, i present to you: Wassailing. of course you can go look it up on wikipedia, but they tend to have all the wit and charm of your high school guidance counselor (after they banned smoking in the teacher’s lounge).

Wassail is a traditional strong beverage made from ale and spices, and served in bowls. many modern microbreweries maintain this tradition, at least in part, by producing a Wassail beer for the holidays. usually they are not as strongly spiced as our ancestors would have made, but they are typically high in alcohol relative to normal beer. what you drink it out of is up to you.

this is the part that’s new to me – Wassailing, in the traditional/historical definition, is not merely the gathering together to consume the aforementioned beverage. Wassailing is essentially caroling – going door to door and singing christmas carols, in questionable (and likely dubious) quality, until being paid by the residents to leave their property.

one might imagine that the combination of Wassail with Wassailing would lead to prompt and considerable payment to reduce the infliction of such “singing” upon those within the household.

so in this, the most sacred of holiday seasons, let us all lift a glass (or a bowl) of our respective beverages, and remember how fortunate we all are — that our drunk neighbors are not crooning on our doorsteps for blackmail money.

so, today ended up being mostly dedicated to beer. we started in the morning, formulating recipes for a Lager, and an Amber that’s mostly based on a clone recipe from McNeil’s Brewery in Vermont.

today we brewed the Lager, and i cleaned & sanitized kegs whilst we were steeping the specialty grains. the Lager will remain in primary fermentation for several weeks, then move to secondary fermentation for quite a while longer.

on friday, we brewed a derivation on our winter beer. it started out as a clone brew of Pyramid Brewing‘s SnowCap from 2003, but has since been altered in almost every dimension. it’s fermenting furiously in primary and should be moving to secondary fermentation soon.

yes, this was a mundane post about brewing. my apologies.

so, a typical memorial day weekend might be spent drinking beer, then going to work at the end.

when have you known me to be typical? well okay, you got me there. but we spent the weekend, in addition to doing household chores & work, doing work on our kegging setup, and didn’t get it done until late monday night.

the last element missing was faucets & shanks. these are the 2 elements that, together, make the “tap” that you see at your local saloon. we purchased 2 of each from a local homebrew supply store, and i spent all day monday doing all the final hookups and testing the system.

we have the capacity inside the chest freezer to hold 4 kegs, and we’ll probably add on at least one more in the next few weeks. in order to fit that 4th keg, we need to do a bit of finagling with the lines & whatnot inside the fridge.

now, with these expenses, how many batches of beer to we have to brew & serve ourselves, before we realize a monetary savings over purchasing it? i don’t know — ask my accountant. luckily, the accountant happens to be the brewmaster (er, brewmistress – aka, alewife) so the answer has to be “it’s worth it!”

hold on, i studied engineering, i can do math. (plus i have access to google calculator). so let’s think out loud, in bulleted-list format:

• 5 gallons of homebrew is 40 pints.
• a pint of microbrew at a restaurant, outside of happy hour, is at least $3.50.
• to drink 40 pints in a restaurant, would cost $140.
• the ingredients to brew 5 gallons beer cost around $30, retail.
• our brewing equipment has already paid for itself several times over in the 22 batches we’ve already brewed.
• a CO₂ cylinder refill is $15 (i think), should be necessary twice a year.
• our chest freezer was energystar rated at $26/yr to operate — that’s when it was a freezer. we’ve convereted it to a fridge, should use less energy.
• propane refill is about $30 (i think) should only need this once a year (only use it for brewing).

so, with all that babbling about, let’s say that a batch of homebrew, with diluted energy and supply costs, runs us around $40 (probably a tad high estimate). that means a savings of $100 per 40 pints over purchasing it elsewhere. is that right? i’ll have to call my accountant to check out my numbers.

i know, we could have saved even more money if we continued to bottle. but frankly, we would have paid that price with out sanity. bottling is tedious at best. and since we don’t really take our beer anywhere or share with anyone (the only friends we have don’t drink) then why do it? we’ll still bottle some (for things we want to condition for a long time, or send to contests) but i think we’ll primarily be kegging from now on.

the only additional ongoing task now, is for me to work in biceps, triceps, and deltoids. because lifting a 40lb keg of beer into the chest fridge is no small feat!

i’ll post pictures up after i take some tonight.