And On To The Next One...

We had a busy weekend planned - mostly cleaning, organizing, and getting Jeannea moved back into her room (so she didn't have to sleep on the couch any more... two weeks is more than enough of that) - but I decided I wanted to throw in another batch of beer too.  In part because I'm going to Valdez for the next weekend, so it's now or it's in two weeks.  If I wait, I'm not confident that the second beer (third batch) will be ready by Halloween.

We originally talked about brewing from the first recipe again.  This time, instead of going from primary to secondary to bottling, we'd skip the secondary so I could see the difference in color and clarity.  However, since nothing much happened while the first beer was in secondary timeout, I figured there wouldn't be much change.  So I went to the beer store looking for a new recipe, with the backup plan to use the first recipe if I couldn't find anything I liked.  I shouldn't have worried.

The third beer is exactly the same as the first, only different.  It's got the malt extract, a small amount of hops, orange peel, and cracked coriander.  But it also has grains, and the amounts for orange peel (double the amount, sweet and bitter) and coriander (half as much) are different.

I used the "Lessons Learned" from the first two batches in brewing this one - but still came up with more.  We put everything in bags - the hops, the grains, the spices.  Greg had picked up some more of the smaller bags, but we couldn't find them, so used the gigantic bag that will hold a small world and maybe some satellites for the grains - just tied it off and dangled it in the boiling water.  However, because it's a 15 gallon brew pot and we're only starting with 2-3 gallons of water, it touches the bottom.  Turns out my new lesson is that the grain bags can melt and burn holes, which in turn releases all the bits that I'm trying to keep contained.  Sanitized strainers come in handy for a rescue mission when it's time to remove the grains...

And likely because of the escaped grains, the pour spout on the kettle didn't work - yet again.  So we ended up siphoning the liquid from the kettle into the carboy.  But it was easier this time because most of the floaties were already gone.  One of these days I'll have the lessons down well enough that when I brew we can actually make the transfer in the easy way...

But the beer is done and active in the carboy.  It's still darker than I'm used to for a wheat bear.  Greg says that this is because we're using the malt extract, and it's darker even with the grains.  In a couple weeks, it'll be ready for the next step.  I think we're going to transfer this one straight to bottles.  At the same time, the apple beer will be ready to transfer into the secondary.  And it's possible (if I'm up for it) that the same weekend we could brew the fourth beer...