Brewing update

I thought my next post would be about peru! (I bet you did too.) But we brewed today and I didn't even update after the last time we brewed, which was just a couple days before we left so everything was crazy around that time. We started an imperial stout on Dec 28th which I can't wait to taste. At that time we also bottled Double Buzz.



I just finished the label today! I can't wait to try it! We went to Heartland Brewery tonight for a beer and a snack and I tried their coffee porter, it was very tasty and made me even more excited for ours. Bad news though - one of the growlers of Double Buzz shattered tonight! It just broke on the shelf! It must have been under so much pressure. It made a mess, as you might guess. We are going to stop brewing into growlers now. It saves time, because we only have to sanitize one container and pour into one container instead of 5-6 separate bottles for each growler, but so far in our brewing career we have had two growlers explode and two that are flat. We brew about 1-2 for each batch, so maybe 20 total that we have brewed. In contrast we have brewed hundreds of bottles at this point and have had one flat beer total and no explosions. So we are sticking with bottles. Once we have our kegging system we can put pre-carbonated beer into growlers to share with others, which is the main reason we wanted to start doing growlers in the first place.

Tonight we brewed Brother-In-Law Brew, which is a Sunshine Wheat clone courtesy of my sister's husband Will as a Christmas gift. It uses dried orange peel and coriander, and it is going to be super refreshing when it starts to warm up a bit! Although we definitely won't be able to wait until it warms up to start tasting it. And we bottled Double Brown, we don't have a clever name for that one although I do have a label idea. Brewing today was pretty uneventful, everything was very smooth.

One other homebrew note. We finally took the time to get organized and move our shelf out to the living room for all the brew. It turns out we have far more than I thought once I saw it all on the shelves! We had it stored in boxes behind the couch, but it was a pain because you have to hang over the couch to get a few bottles to put in the fridge (and since our couch is a futon there is always the worry about falling backwards when you're hanging on the back of the couch) and you can't tell how much you have of anything and since everything is always stacked on everything else you can't always find what you're looking for and I am constantly moving bottles to consolidate boxes but this makes it even trickier to find that brew that I'm craving. So we took all our clothes off the shelf that we had crammed between the bed and the dresser and moved it to the living room. A piece of fabric pinned around the outside as a curtain, and voila! A beer cabinet. Now we'll have to find a place to put our clothes - but in case you haven't figured it out yet, beer comes first in this household.