FOOLCiRCLE

Early this week I received some more kegs in the mail from More Beer.

More Beer sells three different kinds of kegs, new, used, and rebuilt. I rolled the bones and went with the rebuilt kegs. Sure they were more expensive than the used kegs, but after you factor in the cost of the new gasket kit (inexpensive) and my headache and time from rebuilding them last time (expensive) it felt totally worth it to me this time to move in this direction. Plus, I’ve been sitting on a $100 gift certificate to More Beer for almost a year now (thank you Fool Circle tasting crew) so really these puppies turned out to be quite cheap.

So now I have 8 kegs, 4 filled with beer and ready to go, 3 lined up for beers in carboys basically ready to go, and 1 still waiting. Am I going to have to order more kegs again soon? Probably not, I’m just going to have to start drinking more beer! Really, I think if I had 12 kegs I would never (or only once in a blue moon) run into a lack of keg space issue.

So I am a little behind, but it doesn’t really matter, because I wasn’t keeping a schedule!

So I fruited the Wheat Beer last Wednesday. It went well enough I suppose. You can see above the awesome color purple it was for the first two gallons or so, now it just looks like a muddy beer – yum! I used all four of the Naked Juices mentioned below, it maybe a little over kill, but whatever. The funny thing is I hadn’t tried the juices before I bought them I was just going from the raw ingredients and my past knowledge of them. Well of course I had to taste each in a sample cup before I added it to the fermenter and yum-my. Both the juices were banging, but in all honesty if I would have tasted them first, it would have been four bottles of the pomegranate blueberry juice, hands down. Over the past week there has been a mild secondary fermentation, but nothing physically violent. I’m tempted to move the fruited version of the wheat to a third fermenter, more to help remove it from the fruit pulp before transferring to keg than anything else. Tentatively the two wheat beers are being called Frootid “the Wheat” and Naked (the plain wheat, you know the one without the Naked Juices, get it? McCloud? 😈 )

Also, since I was out of secondary fermenters at the time of the wheat transfer, I had to transfer two beers into kegs.

 

So the Fool’s Gold and the Amber Ale got transfered into my last two kegs. Wait a minute, he doesn’t even have my kegerator yet and he’s out of kegs? And he’s already thinking of buying more kegs? Yup. Yeah, even with interruptions, I was able to clean and sanitize two kegs and transfer two beers and soak two carboys in less than two hours. I would have never have been able to even bottle one batch of beer in two hours. OK, maybe if the bottles were already ready, but that’s it. So right now I have four kegs of homebrew downstairs ready to go, three carboys awaiting kegs, and enough ingredients lined up for two more batches. I need to start drinking!

Probably in the next couple days I’ll be transferring my wheat beers over to secondary fermenters, and you know what that means right, fruit!?

Well, this time I am taking a different approach than I have in the past. Instead of actually adding canned fruit, or fruit puree, or whole fruit – this time I will be adding 100% fruit juice. Yeah, I know adding real fruit to the fermenter feels right, but I figured that really the juice is what’s going to do all of the work, so since I don’t have a juicer, it was time to find a source I was comfortable with. I was at the Newark Co-Op today and came across these “fresh” juices by a company called Naked Juice. Basically Naked Juice is just that, juice. Sure they made some that aren’t just juice, they have added vitamins and proteins and little helper-outers, but the ones that I chose were literally just juice. The only slight problem I could find with the juice was that it was flash pasteurized, so that could lend to a slight pectin haze, but really it’s a wheat beer – who cares. But on a positive note, because of the flash pasteurization, I know I won’t be adding any funky bugs either. Other than that, there is no preservatives, or additives, or extra sugar, or anything – nice.

The two juices I’m choosing to blend are Pomegranate Blueberry and Plentiful Pomegranate (which is a pomegranate raspberry blend). So I suppose it’ll then be a Pomegranate/Blueberry/Raspberry Wheat beer, but I think I’ll stick with just calling it a Pomegranate Wheat. I think Saranac makes a Pomegranate Wheat now that I think of it, oh well. According to the bottles each bottle contains at least a pound of fruit, so you figure I’m working with the potential of four pounds of fruit. The fruits and quantities listed on the bottles (all four together) break down like this: 13 pomegranates, 22 raspberries, 46 blueberries, 1 apple, and “white and red grapes for good measure”. Sounds good to me.

I may need to go and buy a wheat beer that I am guessing ours will be similar to, the un-fruited wheat that is, like Harpoon UFO or Magic Hat Circus Boy and do a little fruit juice testing on a sample before I start dumping away in the fermenter. Or not. We’ll see.

So I went to go check on my Wheat beers today, and everything is looking good.

Both of these carboys are just chugging away right now, which is always a happy sight. It’s that time of the year too where it is very easy to keep a nice low constant fermentation temperature. I think these guys were at 64F and looking just fine. I’ve actually been thinking about what to brew after these beers, theoretically with this yeast. Since I should have two healthy yeast cakes that screams two healthy batches to me. I’m thinking one Porter definitely (I know Summer’s coming, not typically Porter time) and one something else, maybe a dark hoppy thing. Why two dark beers? Well, I have a bunch of darker specialty grains I’m trying to run through before I order any more. You know how it is, use up the old stock before you re-stock.

Here’s another fun picture. This is what my basement looks like right now. Two beers being carbonated in kegs, one beer in extended secondary, two beers just recently in secondary, and two beers freshly in primary – makes me happy. I am a simple man.

So yesterday Garrett and I got together to brew 20 gallons of an American Wheat Ale, watch out Cornhole here we come!

 

We had been tossing around the idea of doing another 20 gallon batch for a while now, and Garrett suggested a Wheat beer since Summer was on its way. I think Wheat beers have there time and place (Summer being that), but I know a bunch of girls that hang-out at my house that just love Wheat beers, so I couldn’t say no. The last time we brewed together hadn’t been since the ABA in the beginning of August, since then a few things have changed with Garrett’s set-up. Now he has three 26 gallon brew-kettles and a 15 gallon brew-kettle we get to play with plus two propane burners. His wife Donna also fashioned a super-custom super-pimp mash-tun koozie to help retain temperature in the all stainless set-up. It was an easier learning curve than last time to try out the new set-up, but still a first run all the same.

The day went relatively well all-in-all. We started later than Garrett probably would have liked, but my weekend was all mess-ed up with the Trail Dawg’s Half-Marathon thrown in there. Plus, on top of that, I was late getting to his house and I was half out of it all day. Our recipe called for over 50% wheat which is just begging for a stuck mash, which it did, solid as a rock. But we kind of pre-stopped the mash-out when we started to notice the symptoms and remixed the mash and recirculated, really only loosing maybe 15 minutes at the time and probably saving ourselves a bigger headache later on. The rest of the day really seemed like smooth sailing. I brought over a bottle of The Lost Abbey’s 10 Commandments which was a phenomenal Belgian-style beer, Robert and Karen stopped by, and Donna whipped up some serious sausage sandwiches. By the end of the brewday though, my long weekend had really caught up with me and I was spent.

With the yeast for this brew we used a 2nd generation yeast cake of WLP001 that I reserved from the Pacific Gem Pale Ale. This was a nice clean thick cake and it was just harvested the morning of the brew day.  Honestly I was expecting explosive fermentation by the morning. Instead, I was greeted to the sights of early fermentation signs; positive pressure in the airlock, hazy, light bubbles on top, but by after work time the fermenters were rockin’ and rollin’! It really was a good brew day and hopefully we can pull together another one some time soon.

So I FINALLY kegged the Abbey Ale and RYPA tonight, good thing I haven’t been putting that off 🙄 . (Yes those beers were really brewed back in December, and yes they really have been sitting in secondary since then, and yes you can make fun of me.)

So I started to mentally prepare for Sunday’s 20 gallon batch with Garrett, you know started thinking: OK, what ingredients do I need to bring, what equipment do I need to bring, what beer am I bringing – that kind of thing. Then I realized, I didn’t have two primary carboys ready to go – damn! So in order to free up two primaries I would have to transfer the two beers I have in primary now into two secondaries. Wait, I only have one secondary available right now -damn damn!! OK, well I have two beers in secondary that I can transfer to kegs, then transfer these out of primary into secondaries. SO, I had to clean and sanitize two kegs, transfer two beers into kegs, and clean two secondary carboys in preparation. Then tomorrow I’ll finish up and transfer two beers from primary to secondary, carefully transfer and reserve the yeast cake from both (two different projects), and clean and sanitize two primary fermenters. I think that covers it. Oh, yeah, except for the fact that I’ll probably run out of CO2 tonight while the two kegs are carbonating and won’t be able to get anymore until Monday – damn damn damn!!! Yeah, now that sounds about right.

So last Wednesday (04.16.08) I brewed another batch on a weekday night, it went about as well as the first one did on Monday.

So, the Wednesday brew was unique in a few ways. First, I used whole hops, which I normally use pellet, to test out how the Bazooka screen does with whole hops. Second, I used a single variety hop, which I have done in the past, but not as a standard. And third, I used no bittering hops, just weird. I must say, the Bazooka screen worked like a charm with whole hops, much, much better than it did with pellet hops. I’m assuming the whole hops set-up there own filter bed based around the screen similar to grains in a mash tun, but whatever, it worked. Also, I used only Pacific Gem hops, which is a new variety to me, which I received from Garrett after he bought a pound I think. I don’t remember what he used it in, but I’m sure it was good regardless. And, these hops were like 16% alpha acid, which is huge, so I was curious if I added the hops at non-traditional times if the estimated IBUs would still make up for a non-traditional bittering hop addition. I added first wort hops(FWH), 30 minute hops, and zero minute hops – that’s it.

This batch just so happens to also be a “starter batch” for a 20 gallon batch of American Wheat beer Garrett and I are planning together for this Sunday the 27th. That too is part of the reason I wanted to use whole hops and the Bazooka screen – if it worked I would get very clear wort so most if not all of my trub would be healthy yeast to use in the Wheat batch, but if that all back-fired I’d probably have more “chunky” trub than usual, so you gotta gamble some. In the second picture above you can see how much material was filtered out of the carboy between the Bazooka and the whole hops, sweet! So technically I should go home with 10 gallons of American Wheat wort on Sunday. I am planning on doing 5 gallons traditional and 5 gallons fruited, anyone have any suggestions for a fruited wheat they’d like to drink this summer? Watermelon? Pomegranate? Cranberry? Let me know.

I said it before and I’m saying it again, I am a bad hop daddy!

This picture was taken about a week ago and they are already way more crazy than this. These are 5 year old Cascade hop plants jammed into a smallish flower pot. When I moved in November of ’06 I dug up my hops and brought them with me planning on replanting them in March/April of ’07. Well, I never found a good spot to plant them so they lived in the flower pot until now. Well, actually they’re still in there, but I’m working on it, I swear. Right now I have some raised beds that I’ve thrown together (probably already too small) and have the hardware for the trellis (20ft!). Now the trick is to choose the proper location for the bed, figure out how to securely anchor the trellis, and to get these puppies in the ground. If it isn’t one thing it’s another.

So I brewed an Amber Ale on Monday (04.14.08). This was my first full weekday night brew and I think it went OK.

For this beer I used the same WLP060 yeast as I did from the Fool’s Gold beer, then after this beer I am going to flip it into a Porter. It was a little weird brewing at night, especially a night I knew I couldn’t sleep in the next day. Everything went relatively smoothly, so that’s good, but I did hit a wall around 10:30PM or so that I was really ready to be done, and I still had an hour and a half left of work. If I continue to do night brews I’m going to want to invest in two things; a light for the outside area I brew in (right now I am using the interior light and a flashlight) and a screen door flap to help keep the critters out but to allow me easy access to outside. I think for me the biggest benefit was using time that normally wouldn’t have been used for anything special and doing something special with it and at the same time freeing up valuable weekend hours that would have been spent brewing. I actually would consider brewing on a more regular basis during weekday nights, but I think Wednesday may work better with my “normal” weekly activities. Maybe this will be a way that I can brew more than I have been. Well, I do have five full carboys right now with at least 20 more gallons lined up. And that’s a good thing considering all the homebrew I have left right now is Imperial Stout (Vader) and Cider basically.

So I’ve been a little behind on keeping the site up to date the past week, so hopefully this week will have several new posts. Nothing too exciting, just new news.

 

So I transfered the Fool’s Gold on Sunday. It is a little more amber than I was anticipating, but really I’m not too worried about it. It was mostly a play on words because of the hops that were used (Brewer’s Gold) and my beers name (Fool Circle). The FG was a little higher than expected also, but again not that big of a deal, it was still in the totally exceptable range. This beer was the first time I brewed with this particular yeast, WLP060, and it seemed to be a slow yeast to finish and threw a lot of sulfur out with the CO2. Right now I am using the same yeast to ferment an Amber Ale.