Brew Brain Blog

Another late night bottling beer.  This time, it was my latest attempt at a pale ale.
The tasting was interesting.  I may be too far out of balance with this one.  I put just over 40 IBU’s of Centennial hops into a very light malt grainbill with an SRM of 5.0.  For those not familiar with […]

I put the lid on Batch #2 of Grain School today.  This time I added half a pound of Munich (10) malt to the 1.5 pounds of US Pale 2-row and the same rationing of hops.  I’m using 0.2 ounces of Cascade first wort hopping and another 0.2 ounces with 5 minutes left in the […]

er, bucket. It’s in the bucket.
I brewed up the US 2-row with Cascade today. This will be one light beer, and I don’t expect to like it particularly. I don’t expect to dislike it either, really. It’ll taste like a very light beer with some hops to it.
The brew day did […]

My 1.5 gallon fermentation buckets have arrived!  That means I kick off Grain School this weekend.
Grain school will be my way to really nail down what all the different grains actually cause beer to taste like.  I will be brewing a base recipe, and then several more recipes, each with a different grain added.  These […]

I tasted my Spiced Holiday Ale last night while taking a gravity reading.  I could have barfed.  I knew when I put the recipe together that it was going to be very bad, but I tried anyway just to make sure.  I have always thought my vanilla chai beer would be either a stout or […]

I had quite a long (meaning good) weekend of brewing.  I managed to brew two new beers, bottled one and racked another from primary to secondary.  It is quite a production line at this point.  Thoughts and experiences:
1)  Bottling blows goats.  I hate it and I’m done with it.  Today, I’ll be ordering a storage […]

I decided to measure the gravity on the stout last night since it came in a bit higher than expected after two weeks in primary.  It only dropped another point, so I guess its done.  I’ll bottle this weekend.
Unfortunately, it is very weak on flavor.  Anheuser Busch would be proud.  It is only slightly more […]

These are the two biggest selling designs so far:

You can click on the photos to see more.  I need to do some updating.  The “chunks” design isn’t even in the beer section.  Here’s the store front

Way back last September I bottled up a first shot at an amber ale.  Well, that one was a dud.  It never carbonated - or so I thought.
I took the remaining bottles out of the box they’ve been stored in at room temperatures all this time with the intent of dumping them down the drain.  I […]

I’m sick and tired of two things - bottling beer and poker.
First, the poker.  I’m in a 20K+ hand stretch of running KK into AA and I’m sick of it.  Last night I decided to just move down and enjoy playing again.  Well, it was all going very well, chipping up over $100 on the […]