Pictures from the past.....

I was feeling a little nostalgic and decided to pull some old pictures from archives to share.  Plus I added some of you to the notification email and wanted there to be a post for you to read, and maybe see the others as well...enjoy



Yes there is tin foil on a grill we were using to boil the wort.

This was the beginnings of the first batch of Fistacuffs when the propane went out and I had to run to the BX to get it changed out.  20 minute trip took an hour and a half.

 Kehn's hand stirring what I believed was Dan's Buster Nut, his nut brown ale with a wicked punch.

Don't remember why I took this picture, its just a fermenter bucket waiting to go to work.

Dan in the bucket, with my reflection on the surface.

Our usual set up before the turkey fryer.  Grillin Beer was fun.

Kehn adding the ever important hops to Dan's Buster Nut.

Alll-Riiight

Put up your dukes, the Fistacuffs pose.  So good you'll punch your friends!

And we did.

Baby Rose helping Daddy stir the wort.

Tasting the wort during the boil.

Like I said I was feeling nostalgic so I thought I would add some old pictures to a post.  There will be a couple more posts coming when I get to brew next weekend and possibly another project looming in the near future, Mash Paddle and bar tap pull.  Need some ideas though, for the Muddy Water Brewing Company logo.  Until later.....RDWHHB!!

Beer Drinker Beware!

7 May 2011 was National Home brewers Day!  Most home brewers had set aside ingredients to brew a batch of beer that day in celebration, I was no exception.  However, that is not how that day ended up.  As a matter of fact, my beautiful wife made sure I was able to brew that day and instead of brewing, she allowed me to purchase what she is calling an early birthday/Father's Day present.  Exactly, she let me get a Father's Day present the day before Mother's Day!!  I only hope I was able to show her how much I appreciated it with her Mother's Day gift.  As you can see below, she let me get a kegerator.  Not just a kegerator but the guy was also including the 2/3rds full keg with it.  Coors Light, but it's essentially free beer.  Now I'll be able to keep my kegged home brew cold before drinking, and finally get to lager some beers, I'm so excited.  I have some other plans for the kegerator as well, going to make an original Muddy Water Brewing Company tap pull cannibalizing one of the taps you can see on top in the picture.  I've also had my two beautiful daughters help me decorate the front of the kegerator as you can see in the second picture.  All I need so far is a coupling for the tube from the faucet and the tube for my out-put keg connection and I'm all set.

So I didn't brew on National Home brew Day but the following weekend I did.  I even had some help from my oldest daughter Rose.  Early (0550) I started getting things ready for brew day, and had a little trouble with the new grain mill.  I would show you the video I was trying to take while doing it but you really can't see anything.  That's because as I was flailing around trying not to spill ALL the grains on the ground when the torque of the drill flipped the grain mill.  Needless to say I wasn't successful.  My malt went everywhere.  So like any home brewer who doesn't really have the money to just run out and buy more malt on the spot, I swept up what I could and used it anyway.  Thus Muddy Water Porter was born.  Anyone who drinks this one when its done, be warned, you may actually be drinking mud. 

 

 My good buddy and assistant brewer Nate Kehn warned me it was bad juju to name a beer before the brewing process began, a rule we set when we really started to get into brewing. The last time you remember I named a beer before the brewing process, I brought about a week and a half long cold spell, with freezing rain and ice, that was my Wet Willy's from the post, My Apologies to the Alaska my apologies to the beer. Didn't follow the warning so this time the brewing gods made sure my beer was muddy from the dirt of the garage and by the weather again. See below

 

Always trying something new.....and cheap.....

So for those of you who already know, this will not be a surprise.  I decided, after a lot of searching around, to make my own Draft Beer Jockey Box.  What, you might be asking, is a Jockey Box?  A jockey box is a "box" (or in my case a cooler from Lowe's) that keeps and dispenses cold beer anywhere you need it to without the need for a plugging, as in the case of a kegerator.  Imagine, a cold environment that holds a beer or so in a tube and dispenses that beer cold even if the keg its coming from is room temperature.  I'll just show you how I did it and you can see for yourself.

First of all, I searched everywhere for a cheap kegerator or jockey box before deciding that I could make one cheaper than I was going to be able to buy one.  I believe in total, including the $10 off from a Lowe's coupon, I spent around $75, give or take.  There were two kegerators I found on craigslist for $35-65 but neither one was available.  (IF ITS SOLD PEOPLE, TAKE DOWN YOUR POST!!!)  Sorry about that.  The next cheapest would be $200 so I wasn't so quick to buy those.  Then I thought, why not build one myself?  Cost of a fridge big enough to hold a 5 gal corny keg and all the conversion kits and such would run me close to $200 and that's if I bought an old fridge.  This also doesn't take into consideration the possibility of messing the fridge up when I went to start cutting on it.  Then I saw the Jockey Boxes and thought that it would be a good next step in the kegging and beer dispensing process.  New ones with all the bells and whistles are roughly $300 and I did find one on another site for $178.  So making my own for $75 seems like a good investment......Lets get started shall we....

I started with:
1 5gal water cooler
25 ft. of 3/16" tubing ( has to be this size to fit the keg connection)
1 long tube of 1/2" PVC piping
Connectors to make a tap  (get creative here, I did)
Connectors to hold the PVC pipes together

First I cut the PVC pipe to make the frame work to hold the tubing.  I'm horrible because I just eyeballed it, making sure that it wasn't going to be too tall.

Next came the tedious task of wrapping the tubing around the frame work.  I managed to wrap the tubing downward around three of the four legs of the frame and then wrapped upward using the other leg and the two middle legs.

I know it doesn't look pretty, but it doesn't need to.  The beer will be in the tube and the tubing will be surrounded with ice and water.  Make sure to leave enough tubing on one side to be able to run to the keg and just enough tubing on the other end to connect to the faucet outlet.

The next thing to do was drilling holes in the sidewall of the cooler, one for the faucet and the other for the tube to run from the keg.  My set up was just a 4" connection with a barbed 3/16" on one side and then a valve on the other with a plastic "nozzle" connected to the valve.

Then I drilled the hole for the tubing to the keg.

Then after all the drilling, connect the tubing to the keg connector and to the barbed end of the valve/faucet.  Once that is done, connect it to your keg and test to make sure there is no leaks.

Connect your beer, add ice and water to the Jockey Box, pour a beer and enjoy!

Baby Got Bock....

Ok not the best of puns, but it works...sort of.  I decided to create a bock this go around and for all intents and purposes, I failed.  I still made beer mind you, but this was a lesson in going with your first instincts and sticking with it.

My ingredients were perfect, style wise, to a spring Maibock, and I had every intention of enjoying this Maibock I'm calling St. Joe's Billy Goat.  However, I got curious.  And when I get curious I start to tinker with things.  I tried a new thing, first wort hopping, which changed the characteristics of the beer from a nice spring bock to and American IPA.  Still a drinkable beer I know, but not what I was wanting.  My Wife gave this new beer a name, Hop-tastic, in honor of Easter.

Brew Day came and was a warm one, I ended up spending 4 hours in the sun, 90 degrees.  And what will 4 hours in the sun do for you?  Make you want to take on another project, like say building a draft beer jockey box.  But thats for another Blog post on another day.

The first wort hop process involves adding an amount of hops to the brew kettle as the sparging process is taking place.  As you see above, or can't see, I have an ounce of hops steeping in the brew kettle as the wort is running off the grains. 
By the way:
10 lbs. 2 Row
4 lbs. Crystal 10
1 oz. Northern Brewer (first wort hops)
1 oz. Cascade (bittering 75 min)
1 oz. Hallertaur  (aroma 10 min)
White Labs German Bock Yeast
(added on package Fermentis Dry Ale yeast after unsure the German Bock yeast was working, I'm impatient)

Only boiled over twice.  I may need to get a bigger brew kettle.

I was having some of my BST Amber Ale, a picture of the old with the new.

Thought this was a cool picture.
Lagering is a unique process that involves keeping the tempurature of the beer between 50 and 55 degrees during the fermentation process.  Bocks are traditional German lagers that tend to be higher in the alcohol content.  If you want more of a description, just ask and I'll make a better attempt.

Keg Beer at Home!

After all that I went through brewing BST Amber Ale, you think I would have made it easy on myself by remembering to get some Corn Sugar for the bottling/priming.  Not so.  My Wife suggested we go to Tallahassee, Florida and visit the Home Brew Den, a home brew store I've checked out online before, and is the closest home brew store to where we are now.  Of course its 2 hours away.  The morning of our trip, we were searching the site for items of interest and discovered we had the funds to get something I had been wanting for a while, a 5 gallon "Corny" keg with a 5 pound CO2 tank and all the regulators and tubes.

Now I learned the process of kegging my beer from a video on YouTube, I'm sure you could do the same.  As always the most important thing when brewing or bottling or kegging beer is cleaning and sanitizing your equipment.

I picked up some San Star from the brew store and added it to the keg to sanitize it.  It foamed up pretty good as you can see, and I made sure to dangle the cap in the sanitation as well.

The next step was to start to transfer the beer from my fermenter to my keg.

This time around I decided to utilize a secondary fermenter.  I've read and heard that a wort chiller and transferring your beer to a secondary fermenter will drastically improve beer clarity, and it does.

Once the beer is in your keg, you seal it up and prepare to carbonate it.  I decided to use the quick "force carbonation" method.  I apologize for not having more pictures of this part, I was too excited about doing it and forgot to take pictures.

First I set the regulator to 30 PSI and opened the valve to allow the CO2 to enter the tank.  For the next 4-5 minutes I vigorously rolled the keg on the floor back and forth ensuring to keep the gas hose and inlet closest to the floor.  After that some say to turn off the gas and remove the gas tube and age the beer for one day.  Others say you can blow off the excess pressure and pour a beer. I'm fairly impatient, so I released the excess gas and poured my first glass of BST Amber Ale.  I was not disappointed.

I leave you with a picture of my new keg system.......

Until next time.........

The First Georgia Brew...BST Amber Ale

BST Amber Ale is Born.....with Blood Sweat and Tears.......

So my friends and I decided that you couldn't name a beer until something happened during the brewing process.  BST Amber Ale was born from Blood Sweat and Tears.  As you can see I had to crack 10 pounds of grain by hand instead of using a grain mill.  I will never do that again.  Charlie Papazain is probably laughing at me right now, that is if he reads this.  Next time I get grains from my nearest homebrew store, I promise it will be accompanied by a grain mill.  If you are wanting to follow along, BST Amber Ale is:
8 pounds 2 row
1 pound Crystal 120
1 pound Victory for head retention
2 oz. Cascade pellet hops at 60 minutes and 10 minutes
Feel free to enjoy the brew.

After the grains were cracked and the equipment laid out, I was ready to get my brew on.

A test of the new Mash Tun proved that it was working properly. 

Running the strike water through the Mash Tun to check and re-run the Vourloff.

Instead of trying to use a Folgers can for a modified fly-sparge I bought a watering can, and it works great.

The run off was looking great.

Once the wort was ready I started the brewing process, this is my new brewing set up.  The driveway behind my new house.

Of course it wasn't all happy stuff.  My daughter was outside playing with her sister and tripped and fell, skinned her knee, and fussed a bit about the whole ordeal.  I got to play daddy doctor and clean the knee and place the band-aid.  She no longer wanted to play so sitting quietly on her duck chair was sufficient.

The wort chiller placed in the boil to sanitize.  This was the first time by the way, my buddies bought me one before I left Alaska.  I've never used one before today.

After about 15-30 minutes, which is about an hour shorter than it used to take.  I'm a fan of the wort chiller.

BST Amber Ale transferring to the fermenter, gotta love the the beginnings of a new brew.