I mentioned yesterday that Monday’s brewing went smoothly because of the absence of Joel. That’s not ENTIRELY true.
See that picture? Those are random boards of wood. Those boards were supposed to be part of our temperature-controlled fermentation chamber, which would have been exceedingly useful when fermenting our Drafty Kilt. Unfortunately, our “operations” guy wasn’t able […]

We got some good feedback from the party on our Swashchuckler IPA and so we decided it’s time to give it another go. (Though we would have brewed our Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale if a certain Joel had gotten our fermentation chamber built). The moral of the story: come by tonight. And don’t trust Joel. […]

We’re building our fermentation chambers for our new pilot brewery, in which we hope to be able to control fermentation temperatures to within a degree or 2. The “hope” part of this is pretty crucial. We’ve had our eye on this temperature monitor to actually verify whether or not our control is unrelenting and supreme.

When […]

Ah, conical fermenters. Ever since we bit the bullet and bought 2 stainless steel conical fermenters from Blichmann about a month ago, we’ve spent probably 30 minutes of every day staring at their shiny surfaces. I’ve actually given up looking for a wife and have settled for Gertrude, Stainless Steel Conical #2.
When it came time […]

Tomorrow is arts-and-crafts day at Jeff’s house! Joel will be building out a fermentation chamber for our new conical fermenters. The chamber will involve an insulated box that ducts cold air from our freezer, similar to the one built here by the Duo Team.
And while Joel is doing his best to not kill himself, I […]

As Jeff and I started brewing a batch of our Swashchuckler IPA Saturday, we got word from Joel (still under the spell of the Godzilla virus) that our stainless steel conical fermenters had arrived. Well, what choice did we have? We had to go over there, bring them back to Jeff’s, and use them. And […]

It takes a lot to get Jeff excited enough to crap himself. Well, he just crapped himself. Why? Because we have two (2) 14.5 gallon stainless steel conical fermenters from Blichmann Engineering arriving on Monday. We’ve been pinching our pennies to splurge on these bad boys, which offer a number of advantages:

minimal handling of fermenting […]