Beer Brewing Blog

Did I mention? I guess not. I had my first true beer explosion a couple of weeks ago. I was a bit worried about my Saison as the second yeast addtion didn’t seem to be fully utilized when I bottled as there was still a thick coat of the white yeast cake at the bottom. To furthur my worries, after just a week I opened a bottle and it was completely over carbonated, not a good sign.

So a week later, I’m sitting in the living room and hear a loud explosion followed by a hissing coming from my bedroom (where the case of Saison was being stored in the 32 oz Grolsh style bottles. Sure enough, one had exploded so I knew I needed to bite the bullet and open the rest. Here is what came of that:

Gotta love it.

Back to brewing.  I had a few weeks off, but I’m back.  Three weeks ago I brewed up an oatmeal stout that is now ready to bottle, I’ll get to that tomorrow.  Today I brewed up what I’m calling my Drunken Deacon.  I upgraded to a 10 gallon mash tun cooler so I thought I would give the Drunken Monk another shot with a proper amount of grain this time.  As luck would have it, or lack of luck, I was at a homebrew store and picked up the ingrediants so I could get this ready in time for Brewtopia in October.  As I assumed, the store didn’t really have what I wanted, so instead of 15 lbs of Belgian Pils malt, I have 10 lbs and 5 lbs of Briess 2 row.  Plus, no Belgian Strong Ale yeast, just a white labs high gravity yeast.  We’ll see what happens, it shouldn’t be too bad.  Oh, and I stopped by the store for some brown sugar but I spied a bag of dememera sugar so I picked up that.  $6 for a pound of sugar, gotta love NYC gourmet stores.  SG on the Drunken Deacon was only 1.072, should have been higher.  It doesn’t look like I’m going to get the efficiency I wanted on this one, I hope the high gravity yeast does some magic.