How To Transfer beer between 2 Kegs, video link below:
Tip: Using the Out for both Kegs, prevents beer foaming into the incoming keg as the beer fills in slowly from the bottom of the keg.
If you connect into the incoming Keg using the In – that will cause beer splashing and foaming inside the Keg.
Tip #1 – It’s all about Kegs Man! (but don’t abandon bottling) to build-up your cellar reserves. All brewers will quickly realize that it takes quite a bit of time to do a brew session (all day) and later even more planning needed to bottle, (cleaning, sanitizing, actual bottling time), space for all the bottles – so most people quickly switch to kegging their beer. You can literally keg an entire 5 gallon batch in 5-10 minutes and be done with it. But you also sooner or later realize that there are benefits to bottling, (you can give to friends, co-workers [check your local laws for giving out beer to people]), you can cellar beers for years like wine (not all beer styles apply) and create your very own private reserve label.
Buy bottles that can be cleaned and re-used, like the Grolsch-style swing-cap bottles, or just re-cap a regular beer of your choice.
Tip #2 – Don’t underestimate your brew batch size! Most home brewers do 5 gallon batches and that is all fine and dandy, but soon your realize after all that hard work and time endured, that 5 gallons don’t last long especially when some friends come over for a party.
We usually here unless the batch is experimental, do by default 10 gallon batches, we split the 10 gallon into a 5 gallon Keg, 2.5 gallon Keg and the rest we bottle for friends and add to our aging cellar with a label imprinted and a date.
With each good confirmed batch, I bottle and put away a few bottles or maybe even a batch for long term storage. I usually do this with higher gravity beers, because those keep well better over time like wine. The higher alcohol percentage protects the beer from bacterial infection and overtime the chemicals interactions change the beer for the better.
Tip #3 – Age most beer styles correctly before giving it out for consumption!
Some Belgian styles need to age for 6 to 12 months! Some beers are good after about 2 months! I did tests by opening a beer bottle at 1 month, 2 and 3 and trust me the 3 month old bottle was substantially better than the 1 month old bottle.
Even if you use the best, award-winning recipe that was repeatedly brewed for 1,000 years! – If you don’t wait and age it correctly before giving it out, people will think sub-par thoughts about your beer and your brewing skills. Make sure to say when the beer is under-aged if you must give it out, so that people are aware.
Tip: Some aging time can be cut by filtering the beer, but there are pros and cons.
Yes there are some beers that don’t age well for longer periods of time, usually these are beers that use a lot of hops, like IPAs. Use brown Bottles and try to cellar where temperatures are stable and there is no to little light. Light overtime will give beer a skunky smell, so unless you brewed a hemp beer, you probably don’t want any skunk in it.
Tip #4 – Not everyone wants to join a brew club for a variety of reasons, maybe you are not that social of a person or don’t want to deal with the politics at brew clubs, fees, etc… etc.. etc. There is plenty of good brew forums, blogs and communities for beer discussion (Google+ has many great beer communities and they are all free, just join), and watch your skills get better much faster and sooner than if you brewed alone for the next 20 years, trust me – communities have a lot of experienced brewers of all kinds that will quickly answer your questions, and point you in the right direction – saving you lots of time and money $.
Tip #5 – if you have a friend who brews, don’t be shy and ask them for help, they probably already have developed relationships with other brewers and you could get a hookup and deals on used equipment or new equipment and overall a lot of helpful tips!
Whatever you end up doing, please take extra time to think things through, SAFETY is #1.
Happy Holidays 2014!
2015 brew: this year we brewed it again but we decided to split the batch in half and treat one with American Oak chips. The beer came out fantastic with a smooth velvet clean taste, the oak came through slightly in the background – only in secondary for 3 weeks as we didn’t want an overwhelming oak profile.
If you want a lighter Brown color, ease back on the chocolate malt.
we also did a version treated with American Oak chips – it turn the beer velvet smooth and delicious.
Our Recipe is based on Ellie’s Brown Ale… We post it as is for now and then update it later with our tweaks.
Credit Link – http://averybrewing.com/brewery/recipes-for-homebrewers/
( they have others posted as well and were kind enough to share them with the public, beautiful! )
Anytime we try a new recipe that we have never brewed before, we try to look-up and use some award-winning recipe first, so that the effort is not wasted and we end up with good beer and we will consider tweaking it here and there or changing things up and down.
Also keep in mind that your local brew supply store might not have the exact grains called for in a recipe, so just adjust to the closest grain available that they have, if not sure, just ask for help, usually brew stores have knowledgeable staff.
Also, ask your self what you like in whatever style of beer you want to brew, in a Brown Ale, do you like it a darker tone of brown for the color, spices or no spices ?
OG – 1.054 – Brew Date: 01/12/2014
FG – 1.014 – Racking Date: 01/19/2014
ABV 5.25%
Hops in this recipe are rated using AAU’s, it stands for (Alpha Acid Unit), the math is to divide whatever AAU you need by the acid level printed on the label of your hops (per 1 ounce). For example: Norther Brewer 8.6%. So 7 AAU’s of Norther Brewer is 7 / 8.6 = 0.81 ounces of Northern Brewer (so you will need a scale), you should be fine if you round-off, but then you lose exactness of the formula, you can easily transfer the formula into Excel or some other open-source software and keep track of it there or your favorite brewing software.
Start with a base weight of say 10/11 LB for each 5 gallons or use your brewing software to tune it in more exact, [if you are ODD or just like details] and then divide/multiply the weight by the percentage needed (use basic math).
Example of a quick Excel sheet to compute totals:
Grains:
Pale 2-Row – 80.5%
Munich – 6.4%
C-120 – 4.2%
Honey Malt – 2.3%
Chocolate – 6.6%
Hops:
60 min – Bullion (7.6% AA) – 0.13oz
30 min – Sterling (5.1% AA) – 0.32oz
0 min – Sterling (5.1% AA) – 1.01 oz
Use your house strain for yeast, original recipe used California, but we plan to use English.
Fermentation temp – 68F (from our experience if you are not spot on, you will still get good beer, as long as you stay within an acceptable temperature range).
Happy brewing!
2014 Rapsberry Porter Version below (the beer was only 3 weeks old, looked great and tasted great!)
2013 Pumpkin Porter Version below:
A 5 gallon batch recipe for a nice Pumpkin Porter, based on the recipe of a Edmund Fitzgerald porter clone with our tweaks. We wanted to give it a British theme, so that’s the pale malt we used, but any pale malt suitable for use in porters or stouts should work well.
In addition we are providing you a link to a very good article on the subject of porters in general, a recommended read – by Brew Magazine:
http://byo.com/porter/item/1260-practical-porter
Grain:
Hops:
Hops are rated using AAU’s in this recipe, it stands for Alpha Acid Unit, the math is to divide whatever AAU you need by the acid level printed on the label of your hops (per 1 ounce). For example our hops were: Norther Brewer 8.6%, Cascade 6.7% and Fuggle at 5.3%. So 7 AAU’s of Norther Brewer is 7 / 8.6 = 0.81 ounces of Northern Brewer (so you will need a scale), you should be fine if you round-off, but then you loose exactness of the formula.
Pumpkin:
Add in at last 10 minutes of rolling boil, if you want more pumpkin flavor try adding at last 5 minutes or at end of boil.
A good chunk of either fresh or frozen organic sugar pumpkin is the best, you can substitute for canned pumpkin that you can buy in the store, but……… If you have a little property, try growing some sugar pumpkins, those are the best – or buy them from your local farm and prepare your own pumpkin meat.
In our recipe we used a 2.2 lb chunk of a earlier prepared frozen pumpkin meat! Article on how to do that here: http://kodiakbrewing.com/wordpress/?p=1364
Spices:
What about the spices that typically go along into a regular pumpkin ale ? We didn’t use it in our recipe, but you are more than welcome to try if you want :- )
Mash:
We did the standard mash at 152 F for 60 minutes using the batch sparge method.
video of mashing phase:
video of mash out:
Yeast:
We used – WYEAST London ESB #1968, use your house strain if it is suitable for a Porter.
Fermentation:
A recommended temperature is about 65 F – but there exists various different techniques, so do some research if you want to know more.
Each pumpkin will give you lots and lots of seeds, more than you will ever need.
Pumpkin Ale – is a special type of beer, highly in demand, for the good stuff!
The best fastest way is to buy canned pumpkin and then use that in the beer recipe to brew your beer to learn, but if you want to do it the right way, the proper way is to use fresh pumpkin and then baking it to get the pumpkin meat prepared for the brewing session.
Nothing beats a fresh 100% organic pumpkin grown in your back yard and it is fairly easy to do as well!
There are many web sites that will give you a good idea of how to prepare the pumpkin and then how to bake it in the oven, here are the steps:
some more pictures (after baking is over):
Let the bag cool before putting into freezer!
Cheers!