First State Brewers Blog

So, I go to HDYB today to get my grain, yeast, and other supplies for the next few months… Not the least important of which was the Servomyces yeast nutrient I intend on using for my next batch - a strong dark belgian (Think high-gravity belgian porter/stout). No servomyces. Maybe it’ll come in next weekend but no guarentees. I also wanted to use WLP530 in the recipe - they didn’t have a single vial, let alone 2… so I am substituting with a WLP500/550 mix. Should be interesting…. No Bullion hops for my “Limey Vale Nut Brown Ale” either - but they are getting me 2oz hopefully in the same shipment of my servomyces. So… I guess I’ll do my yeast starter on Wednesday with the expectation I’ll brew Sunday. If the Servomyces isn’t in again, I guess I’ll just toss some regular old yeast nutrient in the batch and charge forward. I’ve brewed something near 1.090 before without the servo, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

My order with B3 for all my b-day stuff is still processing. They were out of the 10 gallon GOTT coolers… so hopefully that’ll ship by next weekend.

My hop rhizomes from Freshops came in - I got 1 jumbo Nugget, 2 jumbo Liberty, and 2 midget Magnum …. The magnum won’t have much of a yield this year (probably none), but the jumbos should have a pretty serious yield. Now to figure out where to plant them.

These hops are actually another way for me to get my wife involved in the whole homebrewing thing (aside from the consumption side which she has zero problem with :D)… She loves gardening, and this is right up her alley. She’s now mistress of tap handles, head bottle filler, and chief hop cultivator. I can’t wait to get that CPBF so she can try it out.

Training in West Virginia was… interesting. Now its over. Glad to be home. They had crappy beer in all the restaurants and hotels. Only micro I could find was Sierra Nevada and all the imports were skunked and nasty (yes, I actually had BAD Sam Smith beer.) Its very nice to be sitting here drinking a pint of my own suds… which I in all honesty find superior to everything I drank this week in WV.

Hey, everyone, there is a thing on bloggers on Nightline right now. One of them is in Falls Church. Woo Hoo!

Jane Hautanen (Jane Doe)

Wife gave me the green light to order my b-day stuff and a couple other things, so soon I will have on its way:

• A 10 gallon GOTT cooler all-grain setup (mashtun & HLT)
• A carved 36″ mash paddle
• A counter pressure bottle filler setup
• A push-button ignitor for my propane burner (sick of dragging lighters out there and singeing my knuckle hair)

I opted to get a 6″ thermometer probe installed on the mashtun to help monitor temperature. Didn’t figure I needed one on the HLT.

My wife and I are also ordering some rhizomes from Freshops this week. I think we’re going to get 2 Magnum, 2 Liberty, and one Nugget. I figure that no one else in our brew club is currently cultivating those varieties, so if they do well I can share the wealth in the coming years. Besides - I hear that Kent Golding and Willamette don’t necessarily do all that well in this area.

Off to Belle, WV this week to train more people on SAP… Yee haw.

I was surfing E-bay this evening, looking for a new flute, when I came across two featured items — beer coolers and kegerators. Just so you know (You’ve probably seen them, anyway).

Jane Hautanen (Jane Doe)

It’s been many years since Theo DeGroen visited the First State Brewers at Charlie Garbini’s house. The Baltimore Brewing Company had been a frequent pub-crawl destination for this club. It was sad when I learned last year that the brewpub was closing its doors. However, this is really good news! Read the following article in the Baltimore Sun.

Delaware brewery is tapped to keep DeGroen’s flowing

Well, turns out that HDYB didn’t order last weekend, so it’ll be next friday before my servomyces comes in. I’m disappointed. I really wanted to brew this weekend, but that was a big piece of what I was going to use in the batch. I know alot of folks in our club think I’m terrible for ordering my stuff online, but here’s a prime example of why I do alot of the time. I’m all for supporting the LHBS, but it’d be nice if once in a while I felt the support went the other way. I’m probably just being whiney and petty, so I’ll stop.

On a very happy note, I am getting 4 more cornelius kegs in the mail today. I just checked UPS and they are out for delivery. For $13/piece (and an additional $3 for a complete O-ring replacement set), Adventures in Homebrewing in Michigan will send you some nice ball-lock kegs. With about 30 minutes of TLC per keg to break them down, scrape off stickers, etc - Its very much worth it. The total order was $81.40 with shipping, which works out to just a little over $20/keg.

• Find the cornies here
• Find the O-ring sets here

Apparently you can also get them for $20/ea from Carbonator Rental up in Philly… I haven’t bought any from them yet, but I did call and talk to them. They seem very nice. They only had 5 gallon cornies last time I called.

I bought more b/c I have read numerous places that Pepsi and Coke are both moving away from the 5 gallon kegs to boxed syrup concentrate… so in a couple years, its going to be damn hard to find kegs. You’ll be able to buy new ones for $90 (OUCH!!!) but that’s a little rich for me. So I figured I should invest now and get some more before the Chinese buy them all up for scrap stainless.

HDYB has scaled back their store hours to just Thursday thru Saturday again. I loved their Wednesday-Sunday schedule, but they must not get enough Wed & Sun business to stay open that much. Oh well… Must wait one more day to find out when my Servomyces is coming in.

My Crankandstein 3D-CGM mill came Monday. The thing is a beast - the mill alone weighs 13 lb, solid steel. I haven’t actually milled anything with it yet (waiting on the Servomyces to go to HDYB), but I did a test run with my drill… its gonna be sweet. There are settings that you can “click” the rollers into place with (like 9 settings), or if you want something outside the normal 0.025″ - 0.065″ gaps, you can even do more than that (without the 0.005″ detent stops). I still need to set it up w/ maybe a stand or something… and I’m also wondering if I should motorize.

The mill is my first step towards cutting batch costs - now I can buy whole grains and keep them for many months - which means I can buy bigger. In addition I’ll be going all-grain in May, and this mill will allow me to get 50lb bags of base malt and brew whenever I feel like it - SO LONG EXTRACT!! BWAA AHAA HAA HAAA!!!

I did some math and doing an all-grain batch will save about 50% on the fermentables side of things… granted some things, like hops and yeast are just fixed costs per batch… but not paying upwards of $2/lb for extract is going to be nice.

I’m also looking forward to having more control over my fermentables ratio - Making big beers w/ extract sucks b/c you can pretty much guarentee a high finishing gravity unless you start subbing out the malt extract for other sugars… So, you either live with the higher FG and hop the hell out of it to compensate (which doesn’t really work well for all styles), sub out for different sugars… or you live with strong, sweet beer. I am not happy with any of these alternatives, so a-mashing I will go… a-mashing I will go…

Bored NASA employee starts up the US Beer Drinking Team. News story here. Official website here.