My wife forwarded a good article from Ohio.com about the rising tide of homebrewers, with a nice shot of John Pastor, owner of the Grape and Granary.
Beer in the secondary as photographed by Ohio.com
The photo of Michael Danks in the article shows a pretty similar set up to my own, with the boil kettle and the 10 gallon water cooler. Looks like he’s stirring the mash while a 7 gallon fermenter bucket sits in the back waiting to be filled with liquid joy.
I also just discovered from my wife that one of our good friends works for LD Carlson in Kent, OH. Have to see what goodness that can bring!
Had some people ask about the Arrogant Bastard clone so I thought I just throw an update out. The brew day went off so surpassingly smoothly that I sort of floated through it.
I modified the recipe some, as I didn’t have all the grain that I thought I did, so the final recipe looks a bit more like this:
15.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)
1.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (120.0 SRM)
1.00 lb Munich Malt – 10L (10.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Aromatic Malt (26.0 SRM)
0.50 lb Caramunich Malt (56.0 SRM)
0.25 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM)
0.25 lb Carafa II (412.0 SRM)
I also went with the 5.72 gallon boil volume recommended which was a mistake given a 90-minute boil time. In retrospect I should have boosted the volume to around 6.5 gallons. Regardless, I had prepared the yeast starter a week or so back and the airlock was bubbling within 12 hours or so.
Next Brews
On another note, I just went to the grape and granary site and picked up ingredients for a Founder’s Breakfast Stout clone and a Flanders Red, which I’m real intrigued about. My wife enjoys Rodenbach so I thought I’d take a stab at it. Little did I know that it involves nearly 2 years and a pitch pack named, enticingly, “The Roeselare Blend” which apparently contains “Belgian style ale strain, a sherry strain, two Brettanomyces strains, a Lactobacillus culture, and a Pediococcus culture” which results in a 1.5″ cake of pellicle on the fermenting beer.
Mr. Beer Kit
As well, I won a Mr. Beer kit on eBay ($25) which I’m going to play with just for kicks and see what I can make out of it. If nothing else there was a post on homebrew talk that mentioned the fake barrel being useful for real ales. Regardless, I can load up that barrel and the party pig and avoid the problems I had with the Keg Charger at the Oktoberfest.
