Reinforcements

This weekend one of our projects was to clean my “beer room”, the unfinished part of our basement. It has needed attention for some time, and it now looks worlds better than it did. One of the projects I completed was reinforcing the shelving where our commercial beers are aging. Its a relatively meager collection, however it was heavy enough to start bowing the 1/2″ particle board it sits on. The reinforcement slats will completely eliminate that issue for quite a while.

In addition, I made a decent attempt at cataloging the homebrew I have in kegs and bottles – the kegs were relatively easy, and I went ahead and included the 30 or so gallons I have in secondary fermenters that will be kegged over the next 2 weeks or so. The bottles were a little more challenging, but not too bad. Now I have a good idea of what bottles I shouldn’t worry about drinking, and what I need to start rationing.

Next weekend I will brew a Blackberry Wheat using some “free” yeast from Joe and Marlana at HDYB. They had a Wyeast propogator pack of their 3056 Bavarian Wheat strain that had expired, and offered it to me gratis (along with my purchase of the 3 sacks of grain). As I make starters for all my yeast strains, it didn’t worry too much – I’ve got a rockin’ 1L starter of it on the stir plate right now, that I’ll let finish out, settle, and then I’ll decant it and pitch it into another 2L of wort prior to pitching next week. I should have a good cell count by then, despite the yeast’s humble beginnings. Once the beer is brewed and fermented, I’ll rack it ontop of 4 or so pounds of the blackberries we picked at Milburn Orchards a few weekends ago.