balls-itsanotherbrewblog

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

Bloobbloobbloobbloobbloob

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

It’s all CalComing up Millhouse.

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Today we make a yeast starter for a California Common on Sunday. Not hard, but definitely a bit time consuming.

God bless Palmer’s How To Brew. What a book.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

Begone, foul infected garbage drinks!

It’s done! I can now relax. What a faff arse. I’ll get to drink it in a fortnight.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

This stuff is ABSOLUTELY infected with something, judging by the vaguely pellicle-looking stuff on top of the bottles. I now need to drink as much of it as I can before it explodes.

It’s done! I can now relax. What a faff arse. I’ll get to drink it in a fortnight.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

req’d by @defenestratte

not with that attitude

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

It’s done! I can now relax. What a faff arse. I’ll get to drink it in a fortnight.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

Dry hopping into a carboy with whole leaf hops is a pain in the balls. Smells good though.

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Against all expectations, all three batches are now coming along nicely. Really looking forward to tasting these at the weekend when I take some readings. Even the one I pegged as being full of crap looks okay.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

Another one in the fermenter. Or fermenters. One batch of NZ hopped wort in A, with Verdant IPA yeast (which smells AMAZING- I’m using this more), one batch of the same wort with Belle Saison in B, and a final batch C the same as B, except 40% of it is feijoa compote and fruit.

Lots of Nelson Sauvin and Moteuka for aroma and flavour, with Pacific Jade for bittering.

I’m excited, but it was a fucking disaster siphoning it out; I used leaf hops instead of pellets, and it blocked it up something rotten. The more, ahem, improvised transfer resulted in lots of shit in one particular fermenter. It could all be fucked, but we’ll see.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

I really need to brew that fucking nightmare New Zealand hopped feijoa IPA/ saison experiment I’ve been planning. All the ingredients ready, I just need the spiritual strength to commit the recipe to my brewing book and cook the bastard.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

Guess who used Maris Otter Extra Pale instead of Golden Promise in his pale ale? This idiot. At least the beer still tastes good.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

Oh, it's ON now

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Oof. Beauty.

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My latest beer creation has turned out pretty good though- a California Common with Hallertauer Mittelfreuh. I blew past my expected SG by a lot, so I've decided it's a double Cal Com, hence the NCR double bear on the bottle.

Boozey, toasty, delicious, even in its flat state. Looking forward to it conditioning.

It's called Bewduiser because it's fake as shit.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

So after all that graft to make a cherry cider, it didn't taste of cherries at all. So I killed back the yeast and dumped some Monin cherry syrup in, then bottled it. Only got five 500ml bottles thanks to all the cherry crap floating around. Food for thought.

[balls-itsanotherbrewblog]

Some initial thoughts on the Pinter, a 5L homebrew setup aiming to be the “Nespresso of beer”. I did not pay for mine, but it was not sent to me to review.

It’s basically a big party keg thing like you’d get from a homebrew shop in a kit that says “make beer to impress all your mates!”, not telling you that it’ll be flat in three days from tapping. The big changes are its fridge-friendly form factor, elegant design, and a removable dock that sits at the tap end, so everything happens in the one unit and most (but not all) of the yeast and trub can be removed before leaving to settle.

Beer is sold as “fresh presses”- a nice, letterbox friendly bottle of pre-hopped malt extract, a vial of yeast, and some cleaner/ sanitiser. It’s a very elegant and well designed product; miles away from weird cans and bags in brown cardboard boxes. Pricing isn’t as competitive as buying your own and doing your recipe from scratch, but the quality is reasonable and you pay for the convenience you get.

I don’t really know who this is for. It doesn’t give a day in, day out, pub style pint like a Blade machine, and it hides away all the satisfying parts of homebrewing. It might be a good on-ramp for people who like drinking beer but have never home brewed before.

The beer itself is middling to poor, in a “my first extract kit” sort of way. Part of that is down to the target brew times the company push as their big selling point- they are far too short, although they do suggest a more sensible duration on the back of the bottle, which you will immediately throw away and forget. They’re doing themselves no favours with this. However, I have bought worse in an actual pub in Oxford, and been too polite to complain, so...

Overall, for the price, it’s not awful. It would make an excellent Christmas gift, and I fully intend to use it to condition and serve my own beer from. I’ll probably hack the next kit I make too, throwing in some California lager yeast and my own hops to give it a boost.