Home Brewing Happenings

By scot in Beer, Home Brewing on Friday, October 19th, 2012

Just wanted to throw down a few of the home brewing tasks I have been doing over the past couple of weeks, along with what is next.

• After recently putting Double Bogey into a used, 5 gallon bourbon barrel, I bottled it this past weekend. It was in the barrel for two weeks. My hectic schedule didn’t allow me to test the beer before determining that it was bottling day. Due to this fact, the bourbon and oak profile wasn’t as bold as I would wanted. Also, I didn’t feel the base beer itself was all that great: not much “dark” profile and possibly a bit too dried out. I thought the same of Worm Burner, a barley wine (that I never blogged about), but this beer has been rounding out nicely in the past few tasting: close to a year after brewing. Based on that, Double Bogey has six months to go before it has the same age. Now the waiting game begins.
• I will be brewing another batch of the aforementioned Worm Burner barley wine this weekend. This will go into the second, unused, bourbon barrel (from the wife for my birthday). I plan on leaving it in the barrel two to four weeks, sampling to begin the second week. I am going to allow it to get “over” indulged since the beer will be sitting around for a year to get the correct flavorings. During that time the profile will drop back some.
• A yeast starter was going well for Worm Burner until I split the 2 liters into two more 2 liter starters. I never did this before, so I thought that the 1 gallon jugs would be fine. WRONG! The yeast were hopping out of the top and under the tin foil the next morning. The concern that I have is that there is less yeast now than from the first round of the starter. I don’t have enough time to crank it up again. Decision time: just go with it or grab a packet of dry yeast to boost up my cells. A lot of time between now and when the beer is ready to let yeast starter problems kill it prior to brew day.

The next month should be a brewing frenzy, centering around Belgians, wild yeast, and bacteria. Enjoy!

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