IPA and other stuff

I recently kicked the first keg of the IPA I brewed in november. Turned out to be great, really smooth bitterness. And the aroma of the big hop additions (amarillo) were really nice as well. A friend of mine told me it smelled like really good pot. I guess thats a good thing.

Also I helped some friends brew 10 gallons of a Helles style lager over the holidays. Heres a few photos.

He wanted to mash hop, so heres the mash with 8 oz. of Brewers Gold (grown on-site).

Heres my buddy Nate getting a whiff of the mash.

This is our host, Chris, Head Brewer (and farmer) at Valley Farms Brewing Co.

It was cold, and it being a farm and all, we used the stuff we had to keep the mash temp up. Its under there somewhere.

Nate lives in Syracuse, and brought us over some beer from Middle Ages Brewing. I believe this was a scotch porter. Heres me and Nate enjoying a brew.

I had to head out before things got finished up. But we may have overdone the mash hops. We'll see. Cheers.

Big beer and happy yeast

I tend to surf the forums at Northern Brewer frequently. There is a guy over there named Denny Conn who is kind of the godfather of the forums. Anyway, he posts quite a few interesting/tasty looking recipes. One of them that sounded good was a Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter. I like bourbon and porter, and vanilla is good as well. So I decided to give it a shot. After several natural disasters delaying the brew day, I finally got around to brewing this past saturday. The recipe:
5.5 Gallons, 80% efficiency, target og 1.086
11 lbs pale 2-row
2.5 lbs Munich
1.5 lbs brown malt
1 lb Crystal 135
1.25 lb Chocolate malt
1.2 oz Challenger (7.5%AA) @ 60 min
1 oz East Kent Goldings (4.5%AA) @ 10 min
Mash at 153 for an hour. Run off 6.5 gallons, boil for an hour down to 5.5 gallons.
Cool to 60 deg, pitch 2 packs US-05
Everything went pretty smoothly, although I did have an issue with the manifold coming apart again. Fortunately, it filtered itself, and I ended up with about 6 gallons of 1.088 wort. Chilled down to 60, aerated and pitched yeast. Pretty short lag, this is what it looked like on sunday afternoon:

Notice the nice krausen already. Well, this thing is going crazy right now, I had to attach a blowoff hose because the airlock was clogged. Wow. I did overpitch a little, but there is a ton of sugar in there to consume. Looking forward to trying this monster, should come in around 8.5 - 9% ABV. Cheers!

New Kegerator!!

So a buddy of mine was looking to get rid of an almost new fridge from his camp. Lucky for me, I was looking to upgrade my kegerator fridge to something a little more energy efficient. Voila, I got a new kegerator. This one holds 6 cornies, and I added an extra tap. Check it out!

Need to get a wider drip tray, but its all set other than that. Cheers.