As Cooper is coming soon we are planning on taking a small brewing hiatus after his arrival until things settle down. To prepare for this we are stocking up on beer. We brewed a clone of Bell's Two Hearted Ale (an IPA), next week we'll brew the Black N Mild (hoppy, 4% beer), then bottle the dubbel (which attenuated a lot and is 7.7% alcohol instead of the anticipated 6.7%), then the next week we'll brew our Belgian Pale ale, and a couple weeks later finish with a porter. Above is a photo of our "Beer Store" in the garage. It is a closet that houses the A/C unit and the hot water heater but has a decent amount of floor space which we use for storage space. In the picture out of view on left is another 2 cases as well. In all, there are 13 cases in the closet (including the case of the First Snow we bottled today) and as such, we are running dangerously low on empty bottles. With all the brewing in the near future we'll likely have to buy empty bottles to make it over the hump. We've only had to buy 1 case of bottles in the past, and although they aren't expensive, it still is a pain to have to buy bottles when we usually get them for free from friends.
In previous posts we've mentioned oaking the First Snow brew in honor of Cooper. Today we added a medium-plus toast, American Oak spiral to 2 gallons of the beer and botteld the other 3 gallons. We are cutting it close to Coop's arrival in that the package for the spiral says it reaches maximum extraction in 6 weeks, and Coop should be here in about 10 weeks. We're going to taste the beer in ~2 weeks to see how it is progressing to see if we need to add more oak and hopefully we can bottled it in 4 weeks to allow 6 weeks for bottle conditioning and aging. Below is a photo of the spiral posing with Cooper.
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