My brewery

So my hopes for the new year include creating more space by eliminating clutter. I have a chest freezer with Johnson Controls as well as one bookshelf dedicated to storage of fermenters, bottles and just equipment in general. I have a propane cooker so as not to smoke out my wife and daughter by brewing upstairs. We have enough space downstairs but a lot of it is taken up by clutter including my tools and our camping gear and holiday stuff and...

I want to put up a couple new shelves and maybe add a collar to the freezer to allow two batches of lager to ferment at once. My long term goal is to have a batch in the fermenter, a batch in the carboy, one being conditioned in bottles and one ready to drink. Here's to a great 2010, Happy New Year everyone

The pils is cold fermenting in the chest freezer. I am hopeful this will be a nice crisp beer when it's done. After the new year I am going to brew my English pub ale and my buddy is going to brew his first beer.

IBU calculator

So I just did an online calculation and my IBU will be about 48

BTW it was Hallertauer

Pilsner is resting

My first lager/pilsner was a breeze to fly, reference to the card game Grass, and this was my first time using DME. The only drawback to the DME vs LME is that it's harder to pour into the boil without help. I digress. The OG was 1.058 and my hopes are that it will end up with a FG of 1.018 or so. I added 3 ounces of hops (2 oz of Tettnanger and 1 oz H something or other). The sampling seemed to have a lot of sweetness so hopefully the yeast eats it up and creates a higher alcohol content. We'll see

New brew tomorrow

So tomorrow I will be trying my hand for the first time at a lagered beer. Specifically a pilsner with some bite. I have had success on my first few rounds of ales and I tried a common without actually lagering it or fermenting in a controlled temp environment and after three weeks in the bottle it has some promise to it. I will let you know how it goes. I love how I'm actually not talking to anyone in particular but I still use the pronoun you. Anyway, if anyone actually has some pointers on how to do this, all info exchange is welcome.

Brew more so we can put out some nanobrews