We have started doing one new technique, the full boil. This is a little more in depth than most people would want to hear about, but instead of starting with boiling about 2-3 gallons for the malt/grains, and then adding water after the boil to reach the full 5 gallons, we started a brew with about 4 1/2 gallons (as close as we could get to 5 without spilling over the top of our 5 gallon pot). I've been reading on the brewing forums (yes, I even read the homebrew forums!) that the results with this are far better than with a partial boil. We'll keep you updated! The first attempt was with the coffee brew.
On a sad note - we may not be able to start a new batch for a little while as we are low on bottles. We have all of our big containers full and in order to start the next batch, we'd have to bottle the oldest one so that we can move everything else along. The options for getting bottles are to either clean bottles from commercial brew (not screw top, only the other kind) or to buy them. Northern Brewer sells them for a reasonable price but the cost doubles when you take into account shipping. So we'll try to pick some up next time we are driving somewhere and can stop by a homebrew store. We have obtained most of the bottles we have by cleaning commercial bottles, but we like to take the labels off so that they are clean and we can put on our own labels, which is a PAIN with most bottles. So for the time being, we'll just have to wait until we drink enough of the homebrew that we can reuse those bottles. I think we're about 15 bottles short right now. I have my work cut out for me!
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