miia monthly

Well I just received my scoring sheets in the mail on Friday from the Iowa State Fair, and I have some very good news. My final judging scores were high enough that I received two bronze and one silver ribbon from the state fair.
And in reading the scoring sheets, the most surprising thing that I [...]

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Seeing how my last post was all about beer, let’s talk some more about beer. And with it being the middle of the dog days of summer, its time for me to partake in my favorite American summer time beer, that being Rolling Rock beer.
Yes, I know that Rolling Rock is no longer an independent [...]

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One of my goals from last year was to enter a couple of beers into the Iowa State Fair. And what ended up happening last year, was that I totally missed the entry deadline, since I couldn’t figure out how to even submit an entry in the first place.
Well this year, I checked the State [...]

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Talk about hot hot hot, oh boy has it been hot and humid this summer. I’ve started on the weeding of the garden, and the first section that I’ve been working on is the rows between the tomato plants. I figure that if I just work at weeding the garden one small section at a [...]

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At first this year, I didn’t think about making hard cider since I’m just bringing online ~15 gallons of cider from the 2009 batches. But then I remembered a conversation with JRR a number of years back, about forcing yourself to make cider each year, since it takes about a year of aging to get [...]

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With fall very rapidly approaching, its time to start moving the 2009 hard cider inventory from the fermentor into a more consumable form (bottles and kegs). So the first batch on the production schedule is batch number 17, which used the Red Star Premier Cuvee yeast. The main reason for picking this batch, was that the [...]

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After months and months of sitting in the secondary fermentor, I finally transferred the red rye ale to a keg for consumption. This beer was ready to go at least two months ago. And with a FG of 1.020, the extra months in the second really did nothing to drop the FG into the target [...]

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It only took me a little over 4 1/2 months, but the never ending 1/2 barrel keg of Bud Light is finally cashed. Since this BL keg was taking up valuable kegerator space in the basement, that I could have been using for my kegs of Christmas beer and Red Rye. I decided to take [...]

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After 7 days in the primary fermentor. Last weekend on Sunday afternoon, I racked off the Irish ale to a secondary fermentor.
The final gravity after 7 days was 1.024, when the target gravity was suppose to be ~1.014. But after racking the beer to the secondary, enough yeast was kicked up to get the fermentation [...]

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Note: Keep in mind that this article was supposed to be posted in November 2009, I guess better late then never. For a current update on the ciders status, see this posting.
So get a load of this. It’s been about a month since I started fermenting this year’s batch of hard cider. And about two [...]

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