If you brew regularly, and especially if you like to use liquid yeast strains, you might want to consider reusing your yeast. As with everything in homebrewing, there is a long list of do’s and do-not’s, but in general, it’s pretty easy to decide if repitching on yeast will work for you.
Fermentation took off like a champ. Guess I pitched just the right amount of yeast. A little bit of krausen snuck up the blow off tube, but none made it to the water bucket.
Cheers!
This past weekend’s brew was an enjoyable one, if not a learning experience. Once again, I modified my recipe based on available ingredients. I wonder if there’s a niche for that?
I had intended a brown, but the lack of crystal malt made me rethink my plans, and I ended up doing some kind of IPA/Amber hybrid ale. Who really knows what it is.
This time, I also tried the technique of dumping some un-mashed grains on the top of the mash before batch sparging. As of yet, I haven’t tasted the fermented wort, but my initial experience was that it added a significant amount of aroma of the malt that was unmashed (which happened to be CaraRed).
This week I kegged a recent brew of mine, and gave force carbing a go. This resulted in a fully conditioned beer available 24 hours after racking it into a keg.
There are many who disapprove of this conditioning process, but if you’re out of homebrew, it’s good to know that you have this option if you want some beer to drink tomorrow.
It’s officially winter in New England. Last night, it was 3F outside.
In addition to enjoying heavier homebrews, it’s also time to put away the wort chiller. Nature takes care of that for me now.
We’re closing in on December, and I’ve put my brewing rig through a pretty rigorous testing period so far this year. I’ve made some minor adjustments, but all-in-all, I’m quite happy with what I’ve got after a minimal investment.
After my second all grain batch, I wrote about my dual 7-Gallon bucket sparge system, aka Papazian’s Zapap Lauter Tun system. Like I said then, I already had the buckets, and all I needed was about 45 minutes, some patience, and a small diameter drill bit.
