Big day ahead.
You all got anything special for St. Patrick's Day?
I will splash in with a variety of some favorites.
Local breweries award winning 7.2% IPA. Bought up two growlers worth (A growler is a half gallon. Price is usually about $8-$10 bucks. It comes out to being almost more than 4 pints you are served. So at least a $6 dollar savings.)
Another local breweries Double White ale. Think a less orangy Blue Moon.. This one a 7.0%er. So frickin easy to drink with a great sweetness. One of these will be the death of me. lol
Then some home brews.. Bottling half our batches actually let us save most of these for 3 months
. Kegging right away just leaves nothing beyond 3 weeks. So its quite the event to actually have 3 home brews available at once.
4.5% Honey Blonde. Light and sweet. A great beer to get the true macro light drinkers on board
5.5% Amber Ale. This one very similar to the honey blonde. Very sweet. Hop smell or taste is kept to a minium. 25 IBU at most.
7.something % Brown Ale. This one we bottled and it carbonated up within just a week. We gave it some time to condition.
This weekend will be quite the feast
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digital022, from page 56. Great updates. Once you get to drink that home brew, and have others not only enjoy it, but consider it something they truly like and have them move away from the macro stuff, it's all uphill from there. You'll want to get better efficiency, make it clearer, and just have an overall better beer as each batch goes along... We just purchased our own grain mill. So no more relying on others. This feat alone will cut our costs down considerably. It's scary how cheap you will get your beer eventually.
We actually had some issues with some bottled home brew. We forgot to dissolve the priming sugar before throwing it into a refrigerated keg we had of our beer (think bottling bucket). So some bottles came out okay, and others not so great. So we went the route of opening many of the bottles, and getting that into a corney keg, and force carbing it. Force carbonation is such a simple process that when you try to bottle again, you can forget steps or get frustrated. Then the sediment is never really where you want it, so you have to serve it carefully. Kegging is 100% where to go.
Are you guys re using the yeast? That's pretty much were we have gone as far as costs. We go from a lighter style to darker, and reuse the yeast 3 total times. Savings, its coming out to about $40 bucks (if we cant get it for free lol)
Next up for us is a really light blonde ale. We have some events coming up so we want to practice first before sharing with hundreds. The original recipe calls for a 4% beer. We are striving for 5.2% at the minimum.
Black patent malts. Chocolate malt flavors... Darker than hell though. Crystal 90l Malt will do that to you. It won't win any contests I'm sure, but the drinkability is there. We won't drink bad beer. And so far none of it has been crazy bad. A blonde ale is in the works right now, just in time for St. Patricks day. It'll have to be a fast cycle, which isn't necessarily ideal. But it'll be fine. 2 weeks to ferment. then a 7 day cold crash/forced carbonation leading right up to st. patricks day
