Brewing Daze

Finished up brewing the beer for the wedding with Matt yesterday. We did a 10 gallon New Belgium Fat Tire clone. Ended up a wee bit on the light side as far as original gravity is concerned. We were aiming for 1.051 and I think the final was around 1.046. It's still beer. I snapped some photos:

Rode my bike over - heating up the strike water.

Hauled a propane tank in the trailer. A bit wobbly on them hills! Note the DC sticker.

21 lbs. of grains and some Target, Williamette and Kent Golding hops.

Mashing the grains in the strike water.

Sparging into the brew kettle. It was raining at this point... Hard Slick got us covered.

The sun came back out eventually. Starting the boil.

Wort is just about boiling with c-clamped hop bag.

Cooling the wort via plate chiller, right into the fermenter.

Matt racking the Saison from two weeks ago. The yeast cake smelled so spicy!

The Saison in secondary.

Wedding Beer

If you haven't heard, I'm getting hitched in June. And for such a festive occasion, it's only proper for there to be copious amounts of beer on premise. I have a friend in town that can help me pull off three batches of homebrew, all New Belgium clones. Matt's great at brewing. He really knows his stuff. He'll be helping me brew my first all-grain batches with his equipment, introducing me to liquid yeast, and lending me kegging setups. It'll be nice not to bottle 15 gallons of beer. The recipes and ingredients will be from Austin Homebrew Supply. Check out the beers on Beer Advocate:

10 gallons of New Belgium's Fat Tire Amber Ale

5 gallons of New Belgium's Farmhouse Ale

Oh, and I had two bottles of our Belgian Tripel last night. At 9% ABV, I could have spaced them apart a wee bit more...

Roll out

The bike is ready. Always is. I'm not. Never am.

Matt Lockaby was kind enough to invite me to watch him brew with his full grain setup next time. He has a reputation of being quite good at brewing, so I'm excited to get the chance to see his process. I stopped by "The Lodge" last night to drop off a wheel for a bike he and Adam are building for a friend, and I got a peak at some of Matt's equipment at the same time. Pretty amazing stuff. Who knew you could secondary in a keg?

Spent some time at the shop last night stripping junk bikes to prepare them for recycling. We are supposedly receiving 40-50 broken bikes from UVA Parking & Transportation on Friday in exchange for a few working bikes for their employees to use. That's one way to recycle. I'm struggling to get a program together where mechanically-oriented volunteers can meet weekly for a few hours to assemble nice bikes and sell them on craigslist for shop rent. Contact me if interested. Free pizza likely.