Bamf Beer

Matt sent me this email today with a new label graphic. He’s a good graphic artist, and he’s been playing with InkScape lately on his Mac, which I guess is working out pretty well. Here’s the new “generic” label – flavor-specific ones to follow:

The next batch will be brewed either the last weekend of September, or the first week in October. It’s going to be a robust or “sharp” porter, based on this recipe. The two cool things about this next batch are a) I have personally never brewed a porter (I believe Matt has), and b) we’re [...]

So here are pics from our brew day last week.
Click on the pics to see descriptions and stuff – Enjoy!
http://flickr.com/photos/bkjones/sets/72157594275146311/

So, as per our usual procedure, Matt put together the recipe for this one, and it looks really good. Also, the little bits of the wort we tasted as it was going into the fermentator were promising!
Here’s the all-grain, 6.5 gallon recipe, followed by a play-by-play of our brew day.
5lb American two-row pale malt
1lb German [...]

OK, so I bottled the red ale today. 5 gallons filled 26 22-ounce bottles. There was a little left at the bottom, of course, but 26 bottles is just short of the 29 22-ounce bottles that would spell perfection for a 5-gallon batch.
We were supposed to brew this weekend, but we postponed it due to [...]

Ok, so the new March 809 series pump arrived to replace the busted one, and Matt and I tested it last night. It works!
It seems to pump at less pressure than I had imagined, but we’ll still need to slow it down if we use it for sparging (which we’d like to do). We have [...]

So we went out to a place we like to go occasionally, specifically because of the beer selection. It’s called Isaac Newton’s, and it’s in Newtown, PA. The reason we like to go there is not so much the selection of beers, but the selection of beers *on tap*. Every time we go there, [...]

Well, we don’t actually have a brew date yet. I’m thinking June 17th, which leaves us only about two weeks to get a bunch of stuff done.
First and foremost, northernbrewer is sending us a new March 809 pump, because the last one was a lemon. This time, the plan is to actually test the pump [...]

Well, we’re boiling the wort as I type this. It’s been a rough road to get to the boil, truthfully.
The main problem is that our pump was bad. We ordered a March pump from Northern Brewer, and it just didn’t do anything at all. Nothing. I called NB support, and lo and behold, the guy [...]

Ok, so here’s the thing. We want a new wort chiller. We have one now – a counterflow system that Matt built with his bare hands. I think it’s pretty cool, but truthfully, it doesn’t quite get us in the temperature range we want. So, the goal is to come up with a solution to [...]