Best Bitter in the Keg

I kegged the best bitter I made a few weeks ago yesterday. Went pretty well, ended up just short of 10 gallons. Also, I'm trying my hand at recycling yeast. I'm planning on making a stout next week, so I saved about 300 ml slurry to reuse. We'll see how that works out. I also added an ounce of amarillo hops to the secondary of an Imperial IPA I made about 2 months ago. I'll let that sit in there for 2 weeks or so, then bottle for aging in the basement. Cheers!

Best Bitter Progress

Just an update to the best bitter I brewed on 4/12. This thing fermented really fast. By 4/15, the krausen had fallen and the gravity had dropped to 1.009. All done and ready to keg right? Not so much. I let the temp drop down a few degrees and took a sample off the conical. Holy butterscotch! Apparently I was having my first experience with diacytel, which is a buttery aroma/flavor associated with some yeast strains, particularly english yeasts. I went on the forum at northern brewer, and was told to warm up the beer a little bit and wait for the yeast to clean itself up, taking the diacytel with it. Problem solved. I tasted a sample tonight again and no buttery aroma/flavor. Probably will keg this weekend.

Active Fermentation!!

Just wanted to post a pic of the fermentation of the Best Bitter I brewed on 4/12/08. Heres a pic of my 15 gallon conical and the krausen at the top of the brew. Open fermentation, no airlock needed.

Seems like this is fermenting along nicely, smells great.

Best Bitter Brew Session

Well, I brewed about 10.5 gallons of best bitter yesterday. Everything went pretty well. I ended up hitting my target og of 1.050 right on the nose, and the yeast is already working, not even 12 hours later. I also took a few more pictures of my system and equipment. Here is a picture of the jsp maltmill that a coworker of mine lets me borrow and the resulting grist:



As you can see (I think), I hit my mash temp right on, although the mash was a little thin for some reason. I think I added a little more water than usual, but it didn't effect anything.

Anyway, I ran off about 12 gallons, boiled down to about 10.75, and chilled using a new immersion chiller. My old one froze this winter, bursting the copper in 3 places. No problem to fix right? I'll get a few 3/8" compression unions and be back in business. No dice, the copper swelled to about 7/16" so the compression unions didnt fit. Long story short, the local Ace was selling 25 feet of 3/8" tubing for $22, so I bought some and made a new chiller. Took about 35 minutes to cool the wort to 65 degrees, so I might need to speed that up somehow.

I aerated the wort last night with the aquarium pump and stone setup from Northern Brewer, pitched 2 packs of Safale S-04, and we have about an inch of krausen this morning already. I'm open fermenting this one in my 15 gallon mini-brew conical, so I'm not sure about bubbling. I'll post back in a few days as fermentation progresses.

Best Bitter

This is the recipe for the best bitter I am going to brew this weekend.
For 10.5 gallons, 80% efficiency.
15 lbs. Marris Otter
1 lbs. Munich Malt
1.5 lbs. Crystal 60 L
1.5 oz Challenger (7.5% AA) at 60 min.
1 oz. Challenger (7.5% AA) at 30 min.
1 oz. Challenger (7.5% AA) at 5 min.
2 Whirlfloc tabs at 15 min.
2 packets Safale S-04
og 1.050
Going to try and mash at 149-150 for an hour.
I'll post more after the session.

Kegerator and other Equipment

Just wanted to post a picture of the kegerator and bar area.

Barleywine Recipe

Heres a recipe for english barleywine that I came up with, with a little help from Jamil, the homebrewing supergenius (apparently).
19 lb. Muntons Pale 2-row
10 oz. Caramunich III
10 oz. Crystal 135 L
2 oz. Challenger (7.5% AA) at 60 min.
1.5 oz. Challenger (7.5% AA) at 30 min.
1.25 oz. Challenger (7.5% AA) at 5 min.
300 ml of 1056 slurry from Elm City Brewing
Mash at 150 deg. for 60 minutes
OG of 1.108 for 80% efficiency

English Barleywine Brew Session

I brewed an English Barleywine with my friends Chris and Nate over Easter weekend. We brewed it at Chris' house, at Valley Farm.

Had a few issues. First, I managed to knock the manifold off the ball valve of the mash tun during mash in. Didn't turn out to be too big a problem, the runoff cleared quickly, and we ran off abouut 7.5 gallons, and had an og of 1.088, or about 72% efficiency. Not bad considering nothing in the bottom inch or so made it out.
The second issue was post-fermentation. Chris fermented the beer at his house, and we had a vigorous ferment and blow-off. Chris attached the blow-off tube, no problem. He moved the beer to his cellar when fermentation was complete to crash out the yeast. Unfortunately, he left the blow-off tube on and the lower temp caused iodophor to be sucked into the carboy. We talked about it, he ended up racking the beer out from under the iodophor, and I am waiting to hear about the fg. Fingers crossed on this one, and lesson learned for sure.

Check these guys out

A few months ago I opened my new BYO magazine and noticed a picture of a friend of a friend named Mike. Turns out, he and a buddy of his started a homebrewing blog called Brew-dudes. Check it out, theres some good stuff on there.

Ghetto All-Grain Setup

So, here's a picture of my all-grain set up. I just acquired the 15.5 gallon HLT, had to build a little stand to add to the tool bench. Mash tun is a 48 quart igloo cube cooler, there is no insulation in the cover, so I made a "mash hat" out of insulation. Works well, holds temps within 1 degree over an hour. I also use a CPVC manifold. I'll post more pics of the whole process after my next brew session.

Welcome!

Hey everyone, welcome to the official blog of Classic Roadster Brewing. My name is Marc, and my initials are MG, a classic roadster, hence the name. I've been brewing for about the last 8 years or so, starting with extract with grains and moving to all-grain about a year ago. I'll be posting some pics of my setup and other random stuff soon.