Pictures!

I'm finally getting around to putting up some pics. Currently, I have some shots taken of my return to homebrewing, after taking a 3 year leave from the hobby. I received an Irish Red kit from St. Pats, and it produced an EXCELLENT brew. I ran into some interesting situations with this batch, though. Read on. Click on pic to get larger image.

Here we have the simple kit. 7 pounds of amber malt extract, 2 ounces of hops, a bag of specialty grains, and some dextrose at bottling (which I didn't use)

Here is the kegging kit, also purchased from St. Pats. An excellent deal, I feel, for $143. You see the not-so-pretty keg at the left, the hoses with all connectors in the middle and the 5lb. co2 tank to the right (complete with dual-gauge regulator).

Ok, fast-forward to the middle of the brewing. I brought 2.5 gallons of water to 145 degrees and added grains. They steeped for 40 minutes, then I sparged them in a colander and brought the "wort" to a boil, while adding the malt extract and hops. You can see it starting to boil here. (Note: trashcan and box is there for a purpose. It was a breezy day and they acted as a wind-block.)

Quite a bit of info here. You can see the workbench in background. I had just finished boiling and set the pot in a cooler with ice. The ice quickly melted and warmed up, so I then filled the cooler with water and opened the spigot. This was so there would be a constant supply of cool water flowing around pot. Took about 20 minutes to drop from 200 degrees to 80. I think I'll be buying a wort-chiller soon. It's much easier. Note: You can see refrigerator in background.

Beer has been transferred to 6.5 gallon carboy and was placed in refrigerator. I did not need the cooling effect of fridge, but it seals tight, blocks out all light, and keeps yeast odor out of house. (Fridge sits in garage). Weather was warm enough to keep fermentation temp at 70 for 5 days. Then cold snap came, dropping temperature to mid-50's. Fortunately the beer was just about done.

To left is beer after six days, and the right is after seven days. You can see beer has cleared pretty well, with a few clumps of yeast hanging around.

Here is that funky yeast I've been talking about. It is from the Wyeast Irish Ale, XL. It looks like curds of cheese! But it produced an extremely fast fermentation and cleared amazingly well. This picture was taken just after transferring to keg, and should be cloudy from all the agitation of moving it around and siphoning. But you can see how clear the little bit of fermented wort is. I would like to hear from anyone else who's used this yeast to see if you got same results. Thanks!

Here's one of my earlier batches of beer, back before I took a 'break' from homebrewing (estimate winter of '95). What was it? NO idea. I still have the fermenter, though. A 6.5 gallon glass carboy. If you purchase just ONE carboy, go with the larger size. It's much more useful over the 5 gallon ones. However, one 6.5g and one 5g carboy are ideal, so you can rack to secondary and start up a new brew in the big carboy! Yipee! :-)

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