Beer and Brewing Journal

A month ago I never imagined that I would have such a great representation of Jolly Pumpkin beers in my “cellar”. There are many mid-west and east coast beers I would love to try but they don’t have distribution to California. Jolly Pumpkin has always been high on my list.
Between http://www.liquidsolutions.biz/ and Healthy Spirits in SF, I have been able to get their Farmhouse, Amber, Noel, and Golden Ales.
I will be trying these soon and reporting back.

I brewed the http://www.more.beer.com/ Irish Red Ale kit a little over a week ago. Here are a few notes about that session.
I did hit my OG of 1.054. In order to accomplish this, I had to add about 1/2 gallon water back to the boil, near the end of boil. This brought me up to about 6 1/2 gallons. I had started my one hour boil with about 6 1/4 gallons, added 7 lbs. of LME and by the end with the 6 gallons left, the OG that was a little higher than I wanted. Bringing it back up to 6 1/2 seemed to do the trick. Note that with this amount it looks like I will only yield about 4 1/2 plus gallons in the bottling bucket.
I need to remember to put no more than one ounce of hop pellets in the small sized fine mesh bag. I had 2 oz. in one and the bag was pretty maxed after taking on liquid. Hopefully I didn't lose too much utilization there.
Air temp outide was about 55 degrees that day. One thing to note is that I siphoned when wort temp was 65 degrees. By the time I had the carboy settled in and temp control plugged in, wort temp was 58. Need to remember about this drop when brewing in the winter. Temp slowly came up and I ended up pitching at 64 degress. Good news is that is got to proper temp of 68 within a couple hours (starter temp was about 70 degrees). By morning, a nice krausen had formed.
My basement gets as low as 51 degrees this time of year but with a couple of towels around the carboy, it seemd to have no problem holding 68 degrees for fermentation. I will probably go straight from primary to bottle after about 2 1/2 weeks. Other responsibilities in life depending.
Not too much protein settling on the bottom so it should be a clean transfer to bottle bucket.
A couple of shots:

On my way to a New Year's eve party, I managed to stop at a great shop named Healthy Spirits, located at 15th and Castro in San Francisco. This place rated well on beeradvocate and I am glad I made the stop.

In the short time since I returned to brewing I have used three different White lab yeast strains

• WLP001 California Ale
• WLP028 Edinburgh
• WLP004 Irish Ale

While I can't yet comment on the affect Edinburgh and Irish have on the taste on the end product, it is important to note how they act during fermentation. Cal Ale and Irish were similar for me in that that have a quick frementation. After the first two to four days, they start slowing down quite a bit. After about a week you may have a bubble in your airlock about every 20 seconds.

Edinburgh was quite different. While it started off with a vigorous ferment, it didn't slow down like Cal or Irish ale. When I went to an airlock after about 4 days, I was getting a bubble or two every two seconds......it stayed this way for two weeks! After two weeks, it started to slow some over the course of the next week. I racked after three weeks and bottled after four weeks. This was for a scotch ale BTW.

One question that concerned me about stir plates is understanding if your yeast is alive and working on your DME based starter. Without a stir plate, you will see a krausen develop and movement within the wort. Since the starter is in constant motion on a stir plate, the krausen never develops. I guess you could check the gravity but that seems like a lot of extra work, plus you may have a small starter (1000ml or less). One easy indicator to determine good activity is a fairly dramatic lightening of color after 12 hours (I make my starter the night before and then check it in the morning), this is a good sign that your yeast is working:

I am a full boil extract brewer who recently just started brewing again after 15 years. I am sticking to extract for now because I need to get my brew process down and I have a lot to learn still. I also have family considerations and spending time with my wife and daughter are my priority.