miia monthly

Since I ended up getting Monday off for MLK, I thought that is is high time that I brew up a batch of beer, since I’m running low of both BL and homebrew. Sure I still have the keg of Christmas beer that hasn’t been tapped (even though all the bottles were drank in early [...]

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Well its been a couple of months since the last gravity check on the hard cider, and surprisingly we are doing pretty good on the final gravity.
Here is the breakdown of the three different batches:

Lalvin 71B-1122 yeast – 0.996
Red Star Premier Cuvee yeast – 1.004
Red Star Cote des Blancs – 1.000

Out of the three batches, [...]

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Boy did I leave this beer in the secondary a long time, just shy of a month. But this time around I’m doing something a little different, in that I’m priming the entire 5 gallon batch of homebrew before bottling & kegging. I’ve had this discussion with JRR offline, but the gist of the conversation [...]

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Last week I ended up racking the Pumpkin beer to a glass secondary, and I took a quick FG reading and it was at 1.014. Which isn’t too shabby. At first I thought about saving the yeast from this batch, but as I kept racking the yeast between jugs. I just couldn’t remove all the [...]

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There is no point in rehashing the post from 10 days ago about the Pumpkin Ale. So then lets dive in head first into the nitty gritty from this brew session.
Last Saturday morning I headed out to the farmer’s market to pick up a butternut squash, after a quick walk around to gauge what was [...]

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Since I really don’t have anything lined up this weekend, other then swapping the battery in my truck. Why not brew up another batch of beer, since I’m starting to run low on the dry stout and IPA down in the kegerator. This time I thought that I would brew up something totally different, but [...]

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Its that time of the year again. With the fall harvest fast approaching, so it could only mean one thing. Time for fresh apple cider! And with fresh apple cider, it means that its time for me to make some hard cider!
Since the local homebrew shop that I use doesn’t carry White Labs (long story [...]

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One tip on separating yeast in the fridge, don’t let it sit in the fridge overnight. Since the yeast in suspension will eventually settle on top of the trub. It may look pretty cool in the growler, to see all the gradations of trub and yeast. But all it does is forces you to start [...]

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Who knew that a $7 thermometer could make such a huge difference? I basically added ~13% eff to this brew session, to come in at ~73%, much better then the 60% on the last batch of IPA.
For the dry stout I had an OG of 1.050 @ 76F with ~6 gallon of wort going in [...]

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Well its been about 5 days in the primary fermenter, and it looks like most of the activity has dropped off. Right now the airlock only bubbles about once in a minute, if not a little bit longer. I did a gravity read, and at 80F it had an FG of 1.008, so that would [...]

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