I’ve got an IIPA that is going to be ready to bottle in about 3 days. It started at 1.100–so I think we’re going to end up at about 10%!!!
Just made a nice ale last night and threw some sweet dried orange peel in the wort. That should only take a few weeks to get done, and I’m excited to see how it turns out.
Still aging a stout in my boubon barrel, that will come out in December. Scared to death to see what has happened to that baby…
I’ll be bottling a Vienna Lager this afternoon and probably brewing up something new also. Either a lager or pilsner, since I have to keep something in the fridge fermenting to justify having the industrial fridge plugged in! 
My Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone has been perfected. Awsome stuff and knocks you off your feet after just a few ozs.
I use austinhomebrew.com and have never had any problems. Good prices and great service.
We are going to have a tremendous elderberry harvest, all over the state, judging by how the blossoms looked in June. Every time we traveled, I made note of where I saw them.
They like to grow in ditches by the roadside, so they’re easy to get. I just snap off the whole cluster.
I got a big steam juicer awhile ago. Those things are great! Just dump the fruit in, and in a bit you’ve got a bucket of pure, sterilized juice. (Elderberries taste better when cooked anyway) I add sugar, citric acid, and yeast. The stuff is like ink. It’s so rich and concentrated that I add brandy to it to make a sort of port.
Mmmmmmmmmm…
Great info!
Any advice on where one could begin if they were looking into this hobby? I was given some cheap worthless brewing set from some store for Christmas last year and it ended up being a total flop but I remain interested in the hobby.
Personally, I like to shop at a physical store; the people who work there (at the one near me, anyway) are always eager to talk about homebrewing, answer questions and give advice. Here’s a directory of homebrew supply stores in the Western states. If there’s no store near you, pretty much everything you need is available online - both in terms of equipment and information. My roommates and I started out with a set of basic equipment (like this one) and an ingredient kit (like one of these) and took it from there. We brewed a lot of extract ales, gradually collected additional equipment, and read a lot - in books and online - about the brewing process. The Joy of Homebrewing is a good book to start with. Just try to ignore the author’s annoying writing style and focus on the information.
Don’t be discouraged by one bad beer. Our first beer was a hefeweizen, and we bottled it way too early - after only a week, like the instructions in the kit said. The beer tasted great, but there was too much sugar in it when we bottled, and every damn one we opened sent out a geyser of foam. You could easily fill three pint glasses of pure foam from one of those beers. Then, last winter, we went through several beers that were very flat. We finally realized that it was too cold in our basement and started keeping them upstairs near a vent until they were carbonated. One of my roommates made a cider that - I’m pretty sure - was fermented by something other than brewer’s yeast. He also tried making an oatmeal stout with regular Quaker oats, and it turned into a sludgy mess. When I started brewing all-grain beer, the second beer I tried was a heather ale. I used way too much heather and way too little grain. Now I have lots of weak beer that tastes like a flowering meadow. Etc., etc. Every brewer has plenty of stories about beer gone wrong.
OH… Eleusis… that JPA was GREAT!! I only wish I had dry hopped it with cascade! Rave reviews!
I plan on doing it again soon and dry hopping it.
I’m still brewing obviously and have recently moved on to All Grain brewing… hit 85% efficiency with my 2nd batch!
BTW I HAVE to thank you for the JPA recommendation… not only did I find a great brew from CJ but the GreenBoard brewboard.com has become my home away from home… lol
I’m Whammo on there too.
Well, I’m really the ‘assistant’ brewer and winemaker in this house, so I can only give brief details. I’ll have to tell the husband to come in here and post the geekier updates.
We did attempt a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone, and my husband did attempt to dry hop it. It’s, well, kind of drinkable. I think a couple too many attempts at filtering might have oxidized it.
My husband built himself a snazzy ‘kegerator’, so no ‘bottling’ was done with this batch, it all went right into the keg, and is now on tap in the garage. There is also currently a Lagunitas IPA on tap next to it, so the homebrew is pretty much just hanging out in there, feeling a little jealous. He also moved his computer set up into the garage yesterday. Coincidence? I think not! 
On Saturday we started fermentation on a Zinfandel kit. I was hoping to purchase a small amount of grapes from a local grower, but we figured the juice from a kit would be a good way to start and get a little hands on experience. We’re planning on taking an Intro to Enology class in the spring together at the local junior college, so maybe by next fall we’ll be able to pick some grapes and really get into it.
The Zin is fermenting away right now, so far so good I think.
Pick up a copy of * The Complete Joy of Homebrewing* by Charlie Papazian. It’s the beer version of the Joy of Cooking - all the basic info you need to know to successfully brew a good batch of beer is in there. Pretty much every brewer I know started off with this book.
And Bobotheoptimist, peach mead (or melomel, if you want to be technical about it) is divine. Out of all the meads I’ve made in my life, peaches are my favorite additive.
This belongs in Cafe Society, so I’ll let it ferment over there.
Of all the beers I’ve brewed, my pumpkin beer is the most-requested. I use the spices sparingly, so you can smell them but not really taste them. I cube and roast about 3 pounds of pumpkin (1" cubes, roasted at 325F) and add it to the boil. I remove the pumpkin when it goes to primary fermentation and add another 2-3 pounds of cubed & roasted pumpkin for the secondary. Great body, great flavor. I just moved and I haven’t unpacked my brew books yet, but I can post the recipe later if you want it.
And this is a worry…why? I love the smell of the fermentation.
I’ve taken to putting vodka in the airlock instead of water. If any impurity gets in there, the vodka sterilizes it.
My homebrewing has been on hiatus for a while while I revamped my rig. I just finished welding everything together and hope to do the first brew on the new system in 2 weeks.
I went from a 3-tier gravity-powered system to a 2-tier with magnetic drive pump, so I can’t wait to try it all out.
For those interested in Pumpkin Ales, I have brewed a “Pumpkin” Ale every autumn for the past 5 years and it is always among our friends’ favorites. But I have found that using actual pumpkin adds nothing to the beer and can, in fact, make the beer worse. So I just brew an orangish, malty ale and add pumpkin pie spices to it in secondary and I just don’t tell anyone that there isn’t any pumpkin in it.
On the professional side, I just finalized some tweaks to a private label ale we make in order to help convince a national restaurant chain to carry it. We should be doing a pilot brew of it next week. I am very excited because it incorporates some changes I’ve been advocating for a couple of years now.
My brother-in-law and I just bottled our first batch (a brown ale from a kit). Everything seems okay, so far. The only thing that had me worried was that when we were putting in the airlock, the little grommet that sits in the airlock hole fell into the beer. I couldn’t get it out with the spoon, so I ended up washing my arm up to the elbow and going fishing! Everything tasted ok when we bottled it, so I’m hoping that contamination was avoided.
InvisibleWombat and August West, I’m very interested in seeing your Pumpkin Ale recipes. We’ve been talking about doing one for our next batch.
Big G, are you brewing with extract or mashing? Either way I can get a recipe for you.
I’m brewing extract.
Extracts have really improved over the past few years. I am tempted to do an extract brew during the boil of my next session.
For theis recipe you should use Alexander’s Munich Malt syrup if at all possible. If not use any amber LME.
Just steep the crushed Special B in the wort in a grain bag while you are bringing it up to a boil, say for about 15 minutes. Take it out before you start boiling, though. In this case your grain won’t add much flavor, but a small amount of Special B gives a great orange color.
Any ale yeast that accentuates maltiness would work. But I like WY1968 because it rips through wort likes it’s angry at it. You could conceivably have this beer ready to drink less than 2 weeks after brewday.
Thanks August West, I’ll show this to my brother-in-law.
I’ll finally be throwing my apple juice and yeast together this weekend… Life kept coming up, and I’ve had 5 gallons of apple juice sitting around for over a week and a half. Annoying!
This time around, I just went with some basic store brand apple juice. I wanted to make sure I had everything right without spending 7 bucks a gallon on high end fresh pressed cider… I end up not saving any money that way, and my wife will be cranky. Heheheh…
I’ve just gotten back into brewing after about a 10 year pause…
The first batch, a simple hefe is in the bottles, and about 2.5 weeks old now. It’s pretty good, with a nice clean wheat taste and color, though next time, I’d prefer just a touch more hops. I might change my mind on that as I drink them though.
The 2nd batch is in the fermenter as we speak. An Ipswich Ale clone.
Recipies for both follow:
Hefe (from the LHBS - Local Home Brew Shop’s recipe files)
6.6# Wheat extract (liquid)
1oz Perle (bittering) - 60 minute boil.
1/2oz @ 50 min hallertaur (flavor/bitter)
1/2oz @ 59 min hallertaur (aroma)
Safbrew T-58 yeast pitched @ 78F into a 6gal glass carboy.
OG 1.044
FG 1.011
Primed w/ 5oz corn sugar in 16oz H2O.
Ipswich Ale Clone:
2 - 3.3 lb cans of your favorite pale malt extract (un-hopped)
.5 lbs 40 L Crystal
.75 oz Galena (boil)
1 oz Willamette (finish)
Wyeast 1028 London Ale Yeast
OG 1.050
FG 1.008
steep Crystal in water and remove before boil
add malt extract and return to boil
add boiling hops and boil for 1 hour
turn off heat, add Willamette and stir
cover and let sit for 15 minutes
chill to 70 degrees, ferment at 60 degrees with 1028 Wyeast for 2 weeks
rack to secondary, let sit at 50 degrees or less for 1 week, prime and
bottle
Optional:
To get the natural conditioning that Ipswich gets, rack the beer into a
keg when the gravity reaches 1.020. Ipswich ferments and conditions
their beer for 4 weeks before packaging.
Are you saying you can get 5 gallons of hard cider for under $40 bucks? Dude, show me where you buy your booze! 
Also, I thought you couldn’t use store-bought apple juice for cider because it has preservatives in it. I’ve never brewed cider before though, so I have no idea.
As psycat90 mentioned above we started a zinfandel from a juice kit this weekend. This is our first wine and I am amazed at the vigorous fermentation. The OG was about 1.090 so I’m expecting this to be pretty “hearty” once it’s done.
The Sierra clone kit I tried turned out to be a bust, but I have no one to blame but myself, as I was sloppy in brewing. I’m pretty sure I just got a stuck fermentation from pitching the yeast at a too-high wort temp(I really need to buy an immersion cooler). I forgot to check the SG before carbonating it, too, since I was excited about using my new kegging equipment. 
A couple of weeks ago I started 2.5 gallons of a sweet show mead using Trader Joe’s mesquite honey. I bottled the cyser a while back and it is pretty good, but it might need more bottle aging to mellow out a little. My next project will probably be another cyser, and then some people from work want a beer brewing lesson. I also have a recipe for old fashioned New England style hard cider which I would like to try out.