Christmas Ale.....aging

Well, the Christmas Ale is now peacefully aging in bottles. I moved it over the weekend from the secondary into bottles and now just have to wait for 11 months to drink it. Out of everything, that is going to be the hardest to take. It's so hard to let the beer age when you know it's just gonna be so good once you do get to drinking it!

Pictures! Top-left is a view of the wort moving from the secondary into the bottling bucket ...thought it was a neat angle. On the right is another picture of the wort going into the bottling bucket. The shutter speed is just slow enough to see the wort swirling, but the remainder of the pic is in focus...cool! Bottom-left is of the bottles after they were filled and capped. Yeah, that's the stuff I can't touch for almost a year. This is the first time I've bottled with using clear glass. Gonna have to keep that stuff in the dark! Sure don't want skunked Christmas Ale come December next year. Better be damn good for as long as I have to wait to drink it!

Landon - Ben ... It's done! What should we brew next?

Igloo Cube Cooler Mash Tun

I have moved this post. It can be found at http://brewtech.blogspot.com/

Christmas Ale With the Bros

Talk about brotherly love. Nothing better than being with family and making beer! Unfortunately, Ben had to work late and couldn't join us for the brew, but I'm sure we'll be doing this again soon and well make sure he can join us!

The new mash tun (the Igloo cube on top)! We put this thing to work! We were brewing High Gravity's Christmas Ale (www.highgravitybrew.com) so we'll have some good drink for next holiday season.


The first mash in the new tun! Isn't it a wonderful sight? This brew we were doing an extract with grains, so not a lot of grain, but it was good to see the new equipment at work! Since there wasn't a bunch of volume in the cooler it didn't hold temp as good as I had hoped, but mini and full mashes should work wonderful!


Adding the extract! With this brew, the extract is where we got most of the fermentable sugars. While waiting for the sparge water to get to temp, we stirred the extract into the wort. After doing the sparge we were ready to get boiling.


Finishin Up! After the boil, we topped off with tap water to 5 gallons, gave it a stir to make sure all was mixed well, added the yeast and capped the bucket!


Moving to Secondary Fermenter! Today I moved the beer from the primary fermenter to the secondary. I took the current SG and it came out to 1.02. Gettin close to having broken down all the sugar into alcohol!


Yay Beer! All we have to do now is wait. I'll be bottling in a week or 2 and then the bottles will sit until Christmas next year.