Twenty pounds of stuff for my next #homebrew just arrived. Going to be brewing a Brooklyn Chocolate Stout clone! (Taken with instagram)

My first fermenter explosion! (Not much of one…)

Just preordered this. Huge fan of Stone Brewing and their whole philosophy towards beer so it was an obvious purchase. Along with the history of the brewery it shares something I wish Sam Caligone’s otherwise excellent book about Dogfish Head had- homebrew recipies for their beers. That, and recipies from their brewpubs. I know I’m going to take a wack at their Arrogant Bastard Ale Onion Rings, especially after tasting how delicious some french fries could be when you drown them in homebrew/craft beer. (Seriously. Make these.)

I haven’t been buying many print books in the last year but I’ve been steadily building up my library of beer books. It just doesn’t seem right to have a page that isn’t speckled with wert and beer, crinkled from having propped it open in order to read the recipies while I’m brewing.

(Racking the beer from the secondary to my corny keg)

Good God, my honey Kolsch is delicious. Second draft beer after the pumpkin ale and I’m absolutely loving my keg. Definitely the best investment I’ve made for homebrew. The reasons that kegs are the way to go if you want to brew beer are simple- you get to drink your beer faster and you don’t have to clean up as much shit. Normally if you brew beer you have to find bottles to put it in, and since the usual batch is 5 gallons that means just over 53 twleve ounce bottles. You can help things by using 22s and champagne bottles but it’s still a huge pain in the ass, because you have to clean, sanitize, fill, and cap each individual bottle after mixing the beer with a little more sugar. After that you have to wait two weeks for the yeast to eat that added sugar and carbonate the bottles. With a keg you just have one container to clean and sanitize and after dumping the beer in it and chilling it you can carbonate it right from a CO2 canister, making your beer nice and ready in a day or so. It’s a beautiful thing.

This week I’m going to brew a brown ale and also try and grab some apple cider so I can make some hard cider. It’s really easy but seems like a fun little project to try.

More soon.