Batting 0.000 so far...

*sigh*... 

 Where to begin? Brewing this year has been an utter failure on all fronts. Yesterday we got together to keg our first two brews and to brew another. Well, we opened up the carboys and all four of them greeted us with a strong sour smell. This was quite disheartening; we'd never had sanitation issues before and yet here two consecutive batches were contaminated. This calls for a serious re-evaluation of post-boil equipment and sanitization procedures thereof. We've identified a few possibilities:

New brew system

So I'm always wanting to get back to a HERMS setup. There are pros and cons to both HERMS and BIAB, but for my money I like the level of direct control afforded by HERMS.

So I started planning one out and, in the process, decided to make a Sketchup model. Behold!

HERMS by antaydos on Sketchfab

Kinda awesome, I know.

Brew day summary

Well, we've got lots to talk about lately, surrounding mash efficiency and assumptions in calculations. To that end, we'll start with the last brew #29.

We had some weird issues with fermentation, in that neither produced a krausen. The environment was 55°F, which is obviously out of optimal range but still high enough to get the yeast going. Sure enough, there was airlock activity, but the lack of a krausen had us concerned that maybe something besides the yeast had taken a hold. Still, we saw no pellicle that would indicate infection. Hmm...

Brewday #1 2015 Success!

We just completed our first brew of the season yesterday, and you can read about it here. However, in this post, I'd like to talk about what could have gone wrong. Mind you, the brew was successful, we made good wort (now the yeast has to make beer), but things weren't as good as they could/should have been. Here I will discuss my thoughts.

Goodbye Winter!

Well, with the winter thaw upon us and temperatures rising, it's time to say goodbye to winter and hello to spring and, with it, brewing season 2015!

Since it went over well with folk, we're going to get started this coming Sunday with an all-grain recreation of our last brown ale. We still haven't had a chance to rebuild our HERM system, so we're going to do BIAB (brew in a bag). This adds some time, but not as much as a traditional all grain setup, as we won't have to worry about lautering and sparging and re-lautering, etc, etc.

Anyways, that's all for now. I just thought I'd share the good news.