Too damn hot to brew. I've decided to take a holiday from fermenting. It's not really a holiday because I think it sucks. I have one alright and one good beer on tap right now; when those are gone I'm going to brew a batch and ferment it in my beer fridge. There's just no way that I could get a decent fermentation in my brewery right now. It's been over 105 for the last week.

A lip on my cooler is going to enhance the brewery greatly. It will exand my cooler capacity so that I can add a thrid keg or another fermenter--lager! I haven't started construction on this, but it will be great.

Here's my fully contructed SIMR:

And a close up:

I've used it to heat 5 gallon of water 3.2 degrees in 1 minute. I wrote a whole long guide on it thinking that blogger would allow me to post a .pdf on it, but i can't post pdfs here. I'm considering an alternative site to host the pdf.

I just cracked a Hobgoblin English Dark Ale. The first thing that struck me about this beer is that it is almost certainly not a dark ale. Deep copper, but an acceptable color for an english pale ale, me thinks. It's certainly a good looking beer, but it's a shade or two darker than a Sammy Smith OBPA.

The next thing I noticed about this beer is that it smells like goldings hops, lots of them, with just a little caramel. It tastes liket that too. Indeed, my rapid conclusion is that I was drinking an english pale ale, and a pretty damn good one at that. I recommend the beer quite highly. It's a model of english Strong Bitter. Really good carbonation--very little at all--assertive hops, caramel malt. Some english yeast character. Nice body that doesn't let the beer go unnoticed while making it a refreshing session beer.

I checked up ont the oaked ale and it registered 7.4 brix, which should mean somewhere in the 14 range for the gravity. I'm racking it today on some french oak chips. The beer tastes mighty fine, by the way. It will be a shame if the oak doesn't compliment the beer.

I'm also going to look into my c. 18th century porter today. I need three pounds of victory malt, 3 pounds brown malt, 3 pounds 2-row, 1 pound 6-row and one pound of flaked barley. There is, of course, a real tempatation to add some crystal malts because crystal malt tastes great and would be a really nice complement to the other flavors in this beer. Too bad: I'm doing a thing here. I think I'm going to bitter it with magnum or northern brewer.

"Never Use Progress Hops" tastes much more like a fermentation flaw than it used to--I think the hops aren't as much to blame as I thought.


I think I've figured out the design of my SIMR. I need elbow-joint needle valve Male and Female end, a 1/4" hose barb for that fits the female end, 6' of 1/4" I.D. silicone tubing and ~2' of 1/4" diamter copper pipe. I can get everything locally except the silicone tube; it's on order from McMaster Carr. I'm also going to have to figure out a tap to make a threaded hole of the right size and threading. This looks complicated and annoying. I think I'll need a drill bit too, and probably a hand tap-handle for the tap bit.

SIMR, SIMR, SIMR....



The weekend project will be to get this thing working as a steam unit for my Steam Injection Mash Regulator.

There are some people way more into brewing hardware than I am. Those are pictures of a SIMM, Steam Injection Mash Mixer. SIMMs are complex variation on what I'm going to build soon, a SIMU, Steam Injection Mash Unit.

The wallpaper steamer idea is a good one, but I'll be using a modified pressure cooker that has a valve to control steam release. Don't worry, when I start building this mofo, you will see pictures and stuff.

43.2 * 6.5/5 = 56.2...

49 / .75 = 65.3

56/65 = .86...

That's 86% efficiency. That's unbelievable, as in, I don't believe it.

But it's how the math worked out. What was supposed to be a modest gravity pale ale is on the verge of being an IPA. I'm going to adjust the dose of bittering hops just a bit, to .6 oz.

I'm guessing I got a point or two from the base malt, which pro mash assumed to be 1.036 potential extract. It could have been as high as 1.038, I think.

Morning Brew Session.

It's my first Saturday brew session in ages. I usually brew in the morning these days, but when it's Saturday morning it feels different. There are things going on in the house besides brewing, and it makes the feel of brewing more fun.

Today's recipes is an amber/pale ale that I plan to oak in the secondary fermenter. I had this idea for a cedar ale, but cedar is poisonous, so I scratched that idea and I'm doing what everyone does: oak. I hear french oak is It, so great, there will be some french oak in the beer. That will make this the frenchest beer I've ever made.

Here's the recipe:
8 lbs. Cargill 2-row pale malt
1 lb. Brit. Crystal 60L
1/4 lb. special B
1/2 lb. wheat malt
1/4 lb. victory malt

Mashed at 154 with a mash out to 167.

Simcoe hops: .5 oz at 60, 30 and 1 minute remaining in the 90 minute boil.

White Labs California Ale Yeast

2 oz. french oak chips, in secondary for 1-2 weeks.