A very quick update

In the keg:

My second attempt at a Pumpkin Ale. I was going a little bit British Brown with this, and used Fuggles in the nose and a SafAle 04 yeast. I think the yeast taste is a little too strong and the spice mix is wrong, but it's not bad. Which is almost more frustrating. I think it may age into something a little better. I brewed it with a friend who was going to be gone for a few months, and I procrastinated getting it into the bottle and the keg because it was going to be a hassle. Also, the big sugar pill carb drops don't dissolve very quickly, and I should have put them straight in the bottle and not in the bottling bucket, because I found them all half dissolved when I'd finished bottling.

In the bottle:

My last few bottles of the simple sweet mead that I started in May 2007. I think it was 3 pounds of bulk grade a supply shop honey to a gallon of water. I boiled the honey and water while I was brewing an Imperial Pale Ale (which succeeded in being an Imperial Pale Ale, but was a terrible choice of keg homebrew for the fourth of July, and may have scared one of my friends off of my homebrew entirely*.). I used a pack of Red Star champagne yeast, and racked it off the yeast bed a month in. I bottled it the first week of October because I needed a gift for the wedding I was both attending and shooting**. I'm extremely happy with how it came out. It's light and sweet and it's at least as good as the cheap mead you get at the ren faire, and better than a few commercial meads I've had. The only problem is that it all went very, very quickly and I'm trying to hang onto these bottles so they don't go away before I have another batch ready to drink. A sidenote about mead is at ***.

In my six and a half gallon carboy****:

Six gallons of a mead with heather and ginger added. I pitched the yeast in September after it all spent a day on campden tablets. I should have already racked this down to a five (and bottled the extra gallon) but right now I don't have the $ for another carboy or better bottle, and I don't want to eat up that much more space in my apartment than I already do, because my roommates are very sweet about it.

In my first fermenting bucket:

Wheat beer hopped with Amarillo for flavor and aroma. I think I added coriander, and I used a Belgian Wit Yeast. I like a little bit of citrus in my wheat, and Amarillo seemed to fit the bill.

In my second fermenting bucket:

Straightforward IPA monohopped with green bullet, from New Zealand. My friend's roommate got me some, which is very hard to come by on the East Coast. I'm going to rack this to secondary and dry hop this with the last half ounce of green bullet pellets.

In my third fermenting bucket:

Belgian Wit. Straightforward to the style.

In a half gallon growler from Macneil's:

A half gallon batch of mead made from two pounds of fancy local organic honey, on Cote de Blanc yeast.

In my five gallon better bottle:

Five gallons of cider, made from cider from the same farm the honey came from. This is the secondary, and it's ready to bottle.

In a five gallon glass carboy:

More of the same, but spiked with a pound of brown sugar.

Beer I am currently drinking:

Flying Fish Extra Pale Ale that I bought in Philly at the little pizza shop near Fiume and Clark Park last March. It's ok. It's also been in my closet since then, so I don't necessarily think a review is fair.


* It was a pretty damn good double IPA. My beer geek friends liked it. But 10% ABV and an aroma you can smell from across the room is probably too much for people who aren't beer geeks.

** Being around your high school friends is weird. Also, the wine bottle full of mead was killed minutes before the ceremony by the groom's party, whisky shot style. And being a first shooter for a wedding for the first time is stressful.

*** People who are alcohol geeks do fine around mead. People who aren't can easily fall prey to how light it tastes and not give it the respect it deserves. People like my librarian-like very quiet and calm friend who for the purposes of this blog shall remain nameless who, after drinking too much mead, got glass breaking, chair throwing, puking on The World//Inferno Friendship Society's merch girl drunk, and looked like hell in the morning. Then again, this kind of comes in hand with opening your home to touring bands and random friends with no where else to stay.

**** Left behind by former friends in a move "back to the land" to start an intentional community in Tennessee.