First State Brewers Blog

Today I brewed and canned 5 gallons of starter wort. It was quite a feat. I started at 9:30am, was canning around 2:45, and finished canning at about 6:30… Long long day. As a result I’ve got a little over 5 gallons ready for future brews, and actually have another 2 quarts in the fridge that I’ll use to make a starter tomorrow for my Bastogne Belgian Ale yeast. I’m going to brew a regular Belgian Pale, then use the yeast cake to brew a massive Tripel. I’m pretty stoked as this will be my first all-grain tripel and will be using some new techniques I’ve picked up over the past year.

Last night we bottled the first 5 gallons of Black Honey Ale that’s going into the cases I cleaned last weekend. Of course one case is walking out the door with Donna’s parents tomorrow, and my guess is that the other will be leaving with my parents in a few weeks, however that’s why I brewed 20 gallons of it.

I also need to free up some secondaries… my saison and fruity wheats are both coming due soon. Heating up the saison has totally saved it… it has significantly dried out, and will be very drinkable and tasty. I am not certain how the short “rest” it had at 1.030 will impact it long-term, nor the decreased yeast count during its slow decline thereafter, but at least its not 10 gallons of pond water. If nothing else, I learned a very valuable lesson about the WLP565 yeast, and not to EVER rack it to a secondary before 2 weeks, and to keep it at 75 degrees during the entire length of its fermentation.

Email from HEAVYWEIGHT:

Hello everyone-

Thanks,
Tom and Peggy

No mention of them closing shop, but my guess is this is pretty much the last public date they will have.

So …. who’s up for a trip?

Use the Comment section below to voice your interest

Which of these carboys has the RASPBERRY puree and which has the APRICOT puree in it.

I bet you’ll never guess. It’s too hard, I know.

Definitely glad that I chose to name this batch “Wheatopia”… judging the clarity, color, and probably overwhelming Frooooooo-tay taste… it probably won’t be too far off the commercial fruit beverage offering. You know you may have gone too far when the krauesen has pink / red highlights too it.

**Snicker**… I’m a sick little monkey.

The kegs in my kegerator, that is. Ya’ll put a serious hurting on my my beer last Friday night at the May meeting… I had about 1/2 gallon in each keg. After the meeting my friends and I had a few pints and … pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft… Kicked.

So now I’ve just put on tap the Native Rage India Red and last 2.5gal of Abbey Dubbel, with something to replace the Oak Aged Vanilla Porter soon - it is also near kicking. Not sure if we’ll put the Choking Sun stout or Black Honey on tap… I’m thinking Black Honey since I’ve got 20 gallons of it
I honestly am not complaining about them kicking - Quite honestly I take it as an assertion of two very important truths - People really liked my beer, and folks had a rocking good time at the meeting. It was pretty impressive - I can’t remember the last time we had that many people in attendence… if ever. I imagine we probably had close to 30-40 people over the course of the night, not including kids.

Did everyone have a good time? Do we want more meetings like that, or was it TOO big? Just curious… I have gotten a couple comments from newcomers that if our monthly meetings are typically like that, they will attend from now on regularly… What about you other folks? I think Ric did a fan-f’ing-tastic job with the presentation, and hope we can entice more professional brewers to come in to talk to us… even if it requires shaming them with the fact that STEWARTS did it and they’re not
Done more ubergeekiness, but I think I’ll hold off posting any more pics until I actually get a full layout ready. Its going really well, better than I expected. Its amazing how quick coding Visual Basic 6 comes back to you, even after a year hiatus.

Sucks that Heavyweight is closing… that pretty much puts the kabash on us going there to do a club brew with them. I’ll have to brainstorm and find some other **cough cough** suckers **cough** I mean iterested parties…

My saison is way underattenuated. I’m actually pretty pissed… but not willing to claim defeat yet, I’ve put a heating pad next to them and heated both carboys up to around 76 degrees, and they seem to be fermenting again. I may actually end up repitching some fresher Saison yeast if HDYB has some, but we’ll see. I pitched a good sized starter, so there really isn’t any friggin’ reason why it should be under attenuated… the only thing I can think is I racked it to a secondary too fast (1 week) and maybe didn’t keep it warm enough. I **WILL** brew this SOB again if it turns out crappy just to see how it was supposed to be…. and I’ll pitch a ridiculous quantity of yeast.

Here’s the latest beer schedule at State Line Liquors!

Thursday, June 1st, 7-9 pm. “Europe: The Ones We Don’t Normally Taste” … Specially selected brews from France, Netherlands, Denmark, Holland, Austria, Poland & Czechoslovakia. This is one you don’t want to miss!

Thursday, June 22nd, 7-9 pm. “Summer Beers”… Pilsners, Kolsch & (select)Wheat Beers.

Thursday, July 13th, 7-9 pm. “Wheat Beers”… North American Microbrews & Craft Wheat Beers, plus German & Belgian Wheats.

If you have been following the news, Anheuser-Busch has been acquiring stake many well known brands for distribution purposes (Red Hook, Pyramid; now Goose Island).

They are behemoths with their own distribution networks, and with their new partners in craft brewing, they have the ability to squeeze out the little guy.

Case in point ~ from the Weyerbacher website:

If you’re in New Jersey, you may need to push your store to get this brew in [DOUBLE SIMCOE IPA -ed.]. With Anheuser-Bush’s push to distribute microbrews in NJ, many stores are not as open to bringing in new products right now. This information is according to our NJ wholesaler, Hunterdon Dist, in Phillipsburg. They suggest you strongly advise your store to bring in this beer or it may get passed on for no good reason. According to some, stores in NJ have been avalanched with new brands lately.

Let you voice be heard on this subject!

!!! Refuse and Resist !!!

Copy & use this clip art at will !!!

I have been spending my lunch hours for the past week or so prototyping a class that will be the first of many for my upcoming computerized home brewery… I figured that while it may be a year or so (or more) before we start constructing it, I could start dabbling with a user interface and figuring out how to display items. My plan is to make the interface layout configurable and customizable such that anyone that wanted to use it in their own home systems could easily do so. I don’t think I’ll be able to slap that level of generality on the back-end state machine for valve / pump / temperature controls, but we’ll see.

The screenshot you see to the left is my test application for clsPipe, a very generic class that allows the user to run pipe based on a collection of points. You can easily turn various properties on and off to render it in a different way… in this case, it looks like we’re running Budweiser through the lines… But you can easily specify the color of the pipe & liquid as well.

I also added a couple of routines to quickly and easily render tubing coils, not that homebrewers ever use such things… The routines are flexible enough to even allow shell & tube arrangements (such as a counterflow chiller) to be rendered without much difficulty.

This class would probably be used primarily for hard-piped configurations… I figure the next logical extension of the class (or perhaps a new one) will be to allow users to run “tubing” lines through some points and render them using Bezier curves and maybe some bitmap overlays…

Of course I still need to work on how to render tanks, pumps, valves, etc, but I already have some ideas for that running around in my head… I also want to make the graphics such that they can be “animated”… which shouldn’t be too hard.

Again, its just a beginning on the long road to getting a working computerized system, but I have a feeling this dream will come true… I’ve got the skills to make sure it does

John Biggins here, excercising his first post as an FSB blogger. Hopefully all will go smoothly!

Yesterday was the BRANDYWINE CRAFT BEER FEST at Iron Hill-Media. The Good News is that there were some fantastic brews among the 25 invited breweries. Standouts I can recall (alas, no notes were taken) included WEYERBACHER Double Simcoe IPA, IRON HILL Bourbon Barrel Russian Imperial Stout, and STEWART’S 2005 Bourbon Barrel Barleywine. Luckily there were plenty of great Pilsners, Hefeweizens, and Belgian Whites to choose from to re-hydrate on a pleasant sunny Satuday afternoon.

The bad news has been confirmed: HEAVYWEIGHT BREWERY is shutting down at the end of June. Tom Baker is closing down the Ocean Twp site, so stock up on all your bottles, as they will be all gone soon. The semi-good news is that he is not giving up totally, but planning on opening a brewpub (in PA, I’m told ~ details not firm on my end) which means we can probably expect a selection of highly quaffable brews plus the few rotating/seasonal high-gravs for which he is famous.

It has been a fantastic weekend to turn 33.

On Friday night we had one of the biggest meetings the First State Brewers has seen since I joined two years ago. Jerry and Joyce Carney always have alot of folks for St. Pat’s, but we must have had 30-40 people here Friday night (more if you count children). Ric Hoffman from Stewart’s gave a fantastic speech on recipe formulation, and I think everyone walked away with some words of wisdom. I have to say that Ric went far beyond my expectations, and I can only hope that we can convince him to speak again sometime in the future. There was a crazy amount of beer to be had, and I think everyone really enjoyed themselves. My only regret was not grabbing our digital and taking some pictures… Thank you to everyone who came. I hope future meetings will see a similar level of participation and revelry.

Yesterday was my B-day and I celebrated it in true homebrewer style by brewing 10 gallons of wheat beer. Entitled “Wheatopia”, I will be polluting it in the secondaries with raspberry and apricot purees (seperate, not together… blech!). The brew itself was textbook perfect - I nailed my mash-in temperature and mash-out temperatures, minimal grain matter went into the kettle, my gravity was dead on (maybe even a little higher), and it is fermenting like mad downstairs. I also got to use a new toy, my 14 gallon demijohn fermenter.

Today will include an activity that most would probably despise, but I am quite honestly looking forward to it… de-labeling and cleaning 7+ cases worth of bottles so I can fill them with homebrew. 4 cases are already spoken for in the way of black honey ale for my family & friends, and as much as I wish I had a couple cases of 750mL amber champagne bottles to put 5 gallons of saison in, I have a feeling that much of it will end up in 12oz. That’ll only leave me with a few spare cases for future batches… I’ll be soaking them in my 14 gallon kettle in PBW, which albeit expensive is a very effective way of removing labels and cleaning the crap that may be growing inside the bottles.

Life is grand

John Biggins informed me of this.

On Thursday May 18th, Six Paupers Tavern will host the official first serving of Tweeds Tavern Stout as brewed by the Twin Lakes Brewing Company of Greenville, Delaware.

Join us from 4:00 to 8:00 and be one of the first to try the new signature brew from local brewers Twin Lakes. An antique horse drawn cart will deliver the first keg at 4:00 from the historic Tweeds Tavern site (the oldest tavern in Hockessin) to Six Paupers. Enjoy complementary light appetizers and acoustic music from Chip Porter of Montana Wildaxe.