Busy Busy Weekend

Probably the busiest brewing weekend we will have all summer. It started Saturday with the bottling of 103 bottles of beer; 42 bottles of the Shark Week Red ale that was hopped with 1 oz of East Kent Golding hops, and 61 bottles of Two Bits Wit. We bottled the red during the mash for Saturday’s brew, and did the wit during the boil. Elise made stickers for the tops of the caps that have the name of the beer on them, and they look really good.

As for the 8 gallons of pale ale that we made, everything did not go as smoothly as planned. First off, we have been having a little bit of trouble with the spigot on the end of our mash tun that is used to drain off the wort. In the last batch (brown ale) the spigot was new, and we thought was working fine, but we soon discovered that there was a small leak in the seal around spigot. We attempted to fix it for this week, but the new addition did not drain the wort out of tun very well. Instead of leaving the grain bed dry, there was about 1 gallon of wort left in the cooler that we could not get out because of the position of the spigot on the inside of the cooler. Because of this our efficiency was down to about 70% this week compared to 75% last week. I will be making yet another trip to Home Depot’s plumbing section, about the 4th in the last 2 weeks, and can hopefully solve the problem for good.

The 8 gallons of pale ale was hopped with Amarillo and Cascade hops, and will get another dry hop addition of Cascade next week. The 8 gallons were split evenly and we pitched a Belgian yeast strain and an American strain. The American strain is now on its third batch of beer, and had just come off the red ale. The Beglian yeast strain was last used in January of 2010, and we were a little skeptical about it still being viable, but a large starter was made last week, and the fermentation started about 6 hours after we pitched the yeast. As mentioned earlier, with the efficiency down, we had a slightly lower original gravity of 1052 than we were expecting, but the beer should finish at around 5.5% alcohol.

As for next week, the hoppy beer trend continues with an IPA (followed after that by a Double IPA). We are still selecting with recipe to brew, either Elise’s or a clone recipe of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale. But we might actually end up brewing both depending on how our week!