Stopped by Northern Brewer for a CO2 exchange, and couldnt help myself. Picked up another tap for the kegorator, as well as two of thier extract kits to see what they're all about. All Grain brewing is great and all, but it only takes a couple hours for extract brews, and done right they can rival that of thier more complex brethren.

Saturday we finally started pushing some beer into kegs! This week we will bottle Lost World Amber and are also busy preparing for brewing a batch of Saison and possibly Snowboard Head!

Both beers were tasting just right coming out of the secondary, with good color and no noticeable off-flavors.

Meanwhile, Hoppy Bastard is bubbling away beautifully! That concludes the weekend's brewing and it's on to planning for the next batch. I made a starter for the Sasion on Sunday. The WYeast package was over three months old, so I got a big three liter starter spinning away for it. I also will be starting a multi-step starter to prepare for the great big 1.115 OG Snowboard Head.

It has been a couple weeks since the planned brewing of Hoppy Bastard, but today it's happening! We are out enjoying a cool Minnesota evening and making some beer!

The strike water is heating and we have our ingredients laid out. The grains were in the freezer up until a half hour ago, so getting the strike temp right will be an adventure!

The mash went very well! Despite the grains being very cold we managed to adjust the strike temperature correctly and hit our target of 155 F. Oh that smell when you open the mash tun after an hour! The fantastic sweet yeast food smell! Just a couple recirculations with the pitcher and on to the sparge.

While waiting for the mash to complete we engaged in some spontaneous engineering. Chilling the wort is still one of the most tedious steps at the end of the brew, and feels like it takes forever. Given that we have been reading repeatedly lately that hot-side aeration is more of a boogeyman than a real brewing concern, we looked for a way to whirlpool the wort mechanically, with what we had on hand.

The result was just sawing in half a plastic stir paddle and sticking it in a drill. We tested it on the sanitizer bucket, which the drill got spinning vigorously in no time.

The drill powered wort stirrer worked amazingly! We got the wort down to 69F in 5 minutes! As long as there are no side effects from agitating the wort so much during the chill, this method is a keeper!

Overall a great brew day!

The ingredient lists for recipe formulations are rendered from data stored in BeerTools Pro files. I pushed a couple of fixes today to clean up some formulations which had ingredients that were not displaying correctly.

Fixes:

• Late Additions from BeerTools Pro 1.0 files now show a boil time.
• Late Additions from BeerTools Pro 1.5 files no longer show a stage of "Unknown".
• Yeast ingredients now show supplier and strain number.
• Ingredients are now sorted by type and boil time.

In other news the brewing of Hoppy Bastard has been delayed again. Tomorrow we should definitely get a chance to brew it though. My cooler with a yeast starter in it has been sitting around the office drawing attention today, and so it shall again tomorrow.

We didn't get around to brewing the Hoppy Bastard this past weekend. I ended up with a house full of little kids to take care of and Justin was building new walls in his house. I did get a chance to get the photo gallery feature completed on the weekend, and got excited to show off the site and posted a link to r/Homebrewing. The link brought almost 30,000 hits to the site yesterday, which was quite a bit more than I was expecting! The server held up fine though and I got a lot of good feedback about the site.

I pushed a fix today to improve tables which have rows that link to other pages (like the recipe list, formulations list, etc). Those links now function better and do not require two round trips to the server to navigate to the new page. With that I think I will be happy with the site for awhile and can spend some time brewing.

The new plan for Hoppy Bastard is to brew it on Thursday. I really want to begin making starters more often and think I will be stopping at Northern Brewer today to pick up a stir plate. I know there are cheaper ways to get or make one but I want to make a starter for Hoppy Bastard tonight. It will be good to get back in the habit again anyway, as we are planning to brew the Snowboard Head barleywine soon as well.

We are also still in the process of porting in data from the old brew log. I added a few new recipes today and there are still several more that I think are worth carrying over.

Update:

I got a stir plate and some yeast from Northern Brewer after work and have the Hoppy Bastard starter spinning away!

We have added a photo gallery feature that will allow us to post images and, optionally, tag them with associated brewings. Here is a fine picture of 25 gallons of beer bubbling away in the basement:

Just a few days after deploying the new Cervisium website and already we are getting in some feature adds! Today the news feed was added, which allows us to have a basic blog roll page. Soon we will have feed items added automatically for brewings when they are entered into the brew log. Also coming soon is a photo gallery and tagging of brews in photos!

This weekend we are hoping to brew The Hoppy Bastard, and have a couple of beers ready to keg. The weather is great for brewing in Minneapolis this weekend!

Hoppy Bastard 2012 Recipe