More Beer!

I put on another three batches of beer. I think at this point my pipeline is full and I can back off. Once the beer is ready, I can do maintence brewing but I should always have beer ready to drink if I put on a batch once a month. I decided to make a cranberry weizenbier which I made on Sunday. On Monday, I had a fellow brewer over and we put on two big 5 gallon batches, one was a maple nut brown and the other was a chocolate stout. The nice thing was, I had a chance to try out a wort chiller and I really liked using it. He had just bought one so we had a chance to play with it. It is basically a copper tubing coil that get immersed into the hot wort. It is then hooked up to either a garden hose or the faucet and cold water is run through the tubing which then cools the wort. It worked very well. I think I will have to pick one up for the next batch. In the meantime, it is now time to sit back relax and wait for the beer to be ready.

I actually tried a few things differently with the yeast for the beer. I opted to try a liquid yeast, although at the time I didn't realize how expensive they were. I bough one package for the two 5 gallon beers and scaled up the yeast then pitched. It worked really well. For the weizenbier, I actually managed to save some yeast from the bottom of a bottle of Unibroue beer that was also a wit beer. That also worked quite well. Not sure if the trouble was worth it in the end as I still had to make something to grow the yeast in but I am really interested in seeing if there is a taste difference. I guess there is the bragging rights, not sure to whom but they are there. The fermentation was really active compared to when I normally use a dry yeast.