Dave---Good luck with your brew--when i was a kid in Connecticut our neighbor made homemade Root Beer--he would cap the bottles and lay them in the sun to do whatever they did--some of them would explode and blow the top off--its cooler up here now thank goodness--as you probably know i am a real old house painter and i only had outside work some days i had to quit around 11 am Your friend in Virginia

Dave .... you seem to be drinking your brew faster than you can produce it - definately a sign that your produce is goooooood!

You are becoming quite the expert - in all areas (or should I say fields) of the process - hahahaha

Watching and enying you

A trying time this must be........
Got to admire you for your self discipline!

if that isn't discipline, WHAT IS? ... two gallons in the fridge not drunk yet???

I brewed batch number five today. That gives me 5 gallons conditioning in bottles, 5 gallons in secondary fermentation and 5 in primary fermentation. Today's batch used all the exact same ingrediants that were in the first two batches except for the yeast. I saved $3 by buying a dry yeast. If it is not as good as the first two batches, I will go back to the liquid yeast. I also used my wort chiller for the first time. The wort is the boiled malt extract that has been bittered and flavored by the addition of hops at points during the boil. You can not pitch the yeast (brewers pitch yeast -- they don't add it) until you reach a temperature of 80 F or lower. In the first batches, I let the wort cool overnight before I pitched the yeast. While this works, it also gives any contaminating yeast an opportunity to get itself established which might spoil the batch. The quicker you get your own yeast in the better. So, I bought a wort chiller which is a coil of about 30 or 40 feet of copper tubing with pvc tubing clamped to it. One end of the pvc tubing has a garden hose fitting on it which you connect to your faucet (I had to place an adapter on the faucet to accept the hose fitting). The other tube is run to the sink and cold water is run through the chiller which acts as a heat exchanger to cool the wort. It worked pretty well and cooled the wort from boiling down to 80 detrees F in about 20 minutes. This will finish the beer a day earlier than I had been able to. Here is a picture of the wort chiller in action this afternoon:



Next weekend, I will bottle batch 4, transfer todays batch to the secondary and boil batch 6. Hopefully I can do this weekly for a while so I can build up a stock of homebrew.

This evening, my apartment smells like a brewery. Most would think that means it smells like beer, but the smell is more of the sweet malt extract with the flowery smell of the hops on top of that. You don't get the real beer smell until the yeast has worked on it. Yesterday when I was bottling, the place smelled like beer. Tonight, you would wonder what in the world I was cooking .