BCHX

bull city homebrew experimental (BCHX)
i boiled the mish-mash brew from bull city homebrew:
3.3 breiss munich lme
3.3 breiss bavarian wheat lme
1# caramel 10 L
1# english ale 2-row malt
2 oz fuggle
1.5 oz cascade
safale us-05

fug/cas additions at 15, 10, and 5, then 1 oz cascade at 2 minutes
boil notes:
cool down took 20 minutes. added safale US-05 that had been proofed og 1.055. light-looking. not so sure about the bavarian wheat LME, but what the hay (get it?). shook the fermenter with the yeast already added (not sure there's a difference). started steeping grains at 140, up to 155 for about 1/2 hour (probably 15 on 155). grain was crushed at the store. made sure to boil after grains and before adding LME. took a long time to get back up to boiling after adding LME. had a very distinct hot break not long after hop addition. was able to avoid boilovers by stirring. only had to take off heat once. stove on 7.5-8 during boil. after cooldown, poured 1 gallon or so of water into bucket, poured wort through strainer, added rest of water to just over 5 gallons (got to have a full 2 cases this time!). started bubbling within 12 hours.
ryepa from 7/22 has been mostly ready, though there are still some green bottles even after almost a month in the bottle. i've drunk about a 6 of green beers waiting for this to condition. i suspect a combination of whirlfloc and not racking enough of the trub to the bottling bucket. it seems like there wasn't enough yeast. i'm not sold on the whirlfloc. i just don't care that much about color at this point. probably more important with the light beers.
homeade brown ale is really nice so far after bottle conditioning for 2+ weeks, though we did have a couple of volcanos at around 10 days.

bottled inki's brown #1

bottled homemade brown ale

ryepa taste test #2

4 days after bottling, rpa is still green. ok, not going to open until at least 8 days!

ryepa bottling day

Bottled the ryepa. accidentally poured a whole bag of one step into the bottling sugar water! Got 3*12 + 5 beers. coulda gotten 2 or 3 more if the siphon hadn't crapped out. wernt werrrr. next time: backfill with more water at ferment time and read the labels of the bags of white stuff at bottling time!

ryepa in secondary, 1st inki brown

Racked rypea to secondary so i can boil the home recipe brown ale tomorrow morning or late tonight. should bottle ryepa in 2 weeksish (8/12). gravity was about 1.015. so far the most behaving brew

brewing my version of big river brown with amber DME instead of the LME. had to measure grains by volume since no scale (6T hopefully equals 2oz). munton's cheap yeast, used DME in starter for first time, hopefuly good.

midwest ryepa, brown ale first taste

yikes! waited a long time to do ryepa. followed midwest recipe pretty closely. 1.045 before yeast. Will bottle on 8/12 maybe. gonna do the primary-only for 3 weeks. i added whirlfloc at 10 minutes, we'll see whether that make a difference.

brown ale turned out good. tried a bottle after 8 days, just fine.

brown ale bottling day

bottled the brown ale after 3 weeks in primary. gravity was still just below 02. we'll see how it turns out. sample tasted good, but i could taste the priming sugar. next boil soon.