Just the opinion of a rookie lol, but I never even test the gravity until the bubbling stops. Is it still very active or just a bubble now and then?

still very active. I was using the one, two, three method.

-J

like I said, I am still very much a rookie. 1,2,3 method? Is that 1 week primary, 2 weeks secondary, 3 weeks bottle? I use to go pretty much by that type of a timeline but now I let the yeast tell me when it is done. I try to keep my yeast as happy as possible . I usually wait until it really slows down and then test the gravity. If it is close to what the fg is suppose to be I go ahead and transfer. On some of my wheat beers, I never transfer to a secondary. I like them a little cloudy and just leave it in the primary for an extra week or so. Then when I go to bottle or keg I make sure I strain it well. The most important thing I learned though is to take notes so that next time you will remember what you did and how it turned out. I hate forgetting things

as of this morning, still bubbling, 9 days and counting!



-J

I used the water bath method to cool the wort. I added the 2 gallons of chilled water in the previous pic. I got it down to 72 degrees in about 25 minutes using this method.



I poured the wort into the primary bucket, I used a funnel with a built in strainer to filter out as much of the sludge as possible.


So here is the wort right before I pitched the Wyeast!





It fermented for about 9 1/2 days, I transfered the wort to the secondary which is my carboy. Here is a pic of the empty primary and the all sludge.




I used my auto siphon, to siphon from the primary bucket to the secondary carboy.





On Good Friday (of all days) I brewed another batch, this one is Honey Brown Ale!

Left to right.... Cabernet Sauvigon / Phat Tyer Amber Ale / Honey Brown Ale.


-J



P.S. All pictures in this post were taken with my Treo 700wx.

Enjoy!

Looks good......so how many empty bottles do you have for all that brew!? Thats the only thing keeping me from having more than one batch at a time. Considering I have 2 Carboys sitting idle.

I usually get about 26 to 27 22 ounce bottles per 5 gallon batch.

There is a restaurant / brew house down the street from my house that sells 22 ounce bottles for 50 cents a piece.

Their "on tap" list changes almost hourly!


Here is there link http://www.thebrewkettle.com/



-J

One thing I do is always buy micro brew beer when I am not drinking my own and save the bottles. Another thing is to find a local bar that sells a lot of micros and talk to them. I started out by going to Old Chicago and the bar tender was more than happy to help out.

That is a great idea, however since I have two batches going, I dont think I will have room for double the bottles in my fridge!



-J

P.S. I just got done racking my Honey Brown Ale!

Jshakour wrote:That is a great idea, however since I have two batches going, I dont think I will have room for double the bottles in my fridge!



-J

P.S. I just got done racking my Honey Brown Ale!

Let me know how that is.....planning on going with a Honey Brown next