A New Brewers Ball Game

This weekend marks a lot of new advances in my brewing system. I'm upgrading my brew kettle to a 7 gallon from a 3. I'm moving from electric to gas for my brewing. AND I'm kegging my first beer this weekend. We are going to brew 5 gallons of Belgium Whitbier and then, take out a few ingredients and tweak a few others and make the same recipe for 5 gallons of a Lambic style beer. Basically the idea is to take the same base recipe and make two totally different beers out of it. Besides the 18 websites that I dug info out of , I basically wrote down all the specs of both and started poking around. I used iBrewMaster to take all the info I had collected and organize it into a recipe that looked  like what we were shooting at!! Sunday will be a big day for us!! As you can see by the picture its about time to get some going!!!

talk to you all again soon!!
Keeton\


Many cool new pics to follow....

The Choco-de-bock-ale Is Fermenting Away.

My latest beer creation went into it's primary fermentation yesterday after about 3 hours of cooking and prep. I went with a partial mash on this one per Todd's recommendation from the Home Brewery in Ozark. Todd is the only guy I have ever bought ingredients form and there's one simple reason, customer service. I didn't have my recipe for this beer at all nailed down before I got there yesterday. I knew what I wanted to make, just not real sure how to get there. Todd took my ideas and turned them into something real, had everything in stock that I needed, and went through  the steps that I needed to follow which were slightly more technical than the brew style I've done in the past. If I'm buying a plastic case for my iPad, I usually shop on the net. but when I'm buying ingredients for a brew I buy local from a brewer that knows whats going on! That's Todd...


After I mashed in and got the the DME dissolved,  (note to self, need a much larger brew kettle to dissolve 10 pounds of dry malt)... I brought the sweet wort up to a boil and immediately boiled over for 1 brief second but I got it under control. Everything else went like clockwork. I also racked all the other brews, The Snowman Ale is in it's secondary and is about a week away from bottling. The two meads have about 7 more months to go. Now to come up with my next brew idea...