Rocky start to 2012

After brewing with my father almost successfully sucked every drop of homebrewing desire I had, I had a hard time getting my head in the game to brew today. I'm glad that I did, but the whole process left me feeling drained and unhappy. Maybe I'm coming down with something, who knows.

But, yet again, I brew with a slew of problems. For starters, my mash temperature dropped from 156 to 146 over the course of an hour, I sparged with half a gallon too much water, causing a boil-over. I even took two large glasses of wort out and added them over the course of the boil. And, to top it all off, my dumb ass didn't use a hop bag for my aroma hop addition, so 2/3 of an ounce of hops adorned the last bit of wort. All in all I thought I used half a gallon too much water, but I ended up with 1-2 quarts too little in the fermenter.

There was good news, though. I hit my target OG (1.061, after a temperature adjustment). The yeast starter turned out fine and hopefully by the end of tonight I'll see bubbles. I also used proper cleanser this time (Easy Alkaline), which did a remarkably awesome job at cleaning the brew kettle of the boil-over junk.

Hopefully once I see bubbles and smell beer I'll start feeling better, but in the mean time it's time to start thinking about my next brewday in three weeks (the porter takes three weeks in the primary). It's going to be a simple hefeweizen that should have hints of bubblegum.

New year, new goal - 100 gallons!

Here I am in 2012, with a new brew plan and a brand new MLT (more on that in a bit). My goal is to brew 100 gallons of beer this year, across 8 recipes. I'm going to make five recipes on a cycle until I get them down. These will serve as my five house brews and the plan is to have them available at any time. A porter, red ale, pale ale, DIPA, and hefe. The porter and the hefe are the only recipes that have any of my modifications in them (porter has added coffee flavor and the hefe has my hand selected yeast), but hopefully by the end of it all all five will have sufficient modifications that I can give them a name.

I refuse to name a beer unless it's original enough that it's something new. With that in mind, I'm going to be making the big five beers on a cycle all year, with three beers being brewed later in the year for the holiday season. A pumpkin beer (with real pumpkin, recipe undetermined), an imperial harvest ale (everyone loved it despite it being terribly incomplete), and a christmas ale. Last year the Christmas ale had too much cherry and too much oak, so next year my goal is to make it the way I intended, that being like a gingerbread house in a bottle. So nix the cherries and half the oak and quadruple the ginger and add some to secondary. Or something like that, anyway.

But the real star of the 2012 season is my shiny new (and bright orange) Mash-Lauter ... container. I hate the word "tun" for some reason. Sarah's father gt me a 10 gallon watercooler for Christmas and today I purchased all the parts and put it together. No leaks! Though I did have to use two lock washers to get the installed hardware to sit snugly.

Unfortunately, my local home brew store is closed Monday, so bright and early (early being sometime in the afternoon) Tuesday I'm going to purchase ingredients and cleaners and a few other things. Brewday should be Thursday or Friday once I've had sufficient time to make a starter. Going to do all of my beers this year with starters because why not? I plan on making each of these beers at least three times, so if doing a starter I get weird results that can be attributed to a starter, then no more starters will I do. Also it'll give me an excuse to not have to buy yeast 15 times instead of a more comfortable 5.