Brewfest and Bottling

Well, about a month since my last blog.  So time for another.

Brewfest!!!!
     Over this past weekend I had the enjoyment of attending the 13th Annual Capital City Invitational Beer Festival Hosted by Appalachian Brewing Company, or in short, Brewfest.  This brewfest was held at the ABC Brewpub in Downtown Harrisburg, PA.  With 20 different breweries represented, I had a wonderful time sampling all the different brews and eating great food!  What an event. Even the local Home Brew Club ReHAB (Regional Harrisburg Area Brewers) were there with live brewing demonstrations. The Barley Wine they were brewing filled the entire second floor with that amazing smell of boiling wort that I've grown to know and love!  I think they had some of the better tasting brews at the fest, but my top three were tied between ABC's 666, Voodoo's Love Child (Belgian Fruit Triple), and Blue Canoe's Breakfast Brown Ale (the name escapes me, and their website doesn't list it either).  The Love Child was Emily's favorite at the fest.  Big thanks goes out to Emily's Parents, Art and Jane.  They bought tickets for Emily and myself as early birthday presents. 
     After the fest we all headed over to Al's Of Hampden to try out all of the wonderful micro's on tap.  Al's has 24 constantly rotating beers on tap, along with three Beer Engines.  I believe there are 6 taps that run on nitrogen.  We sampled over 12 different beers at Al's all of them being very good.  Needless to say, all that beer tasting led me to be quite buzzy.  Not drunk, but definitely not sober either. 


Bottling
     Oh bottling, how I have a love/hate relationship with you.  Bottling can be such a pain, but also feel so rewarding.  First comes the cleaning; a nice long hot soak in oxyclean always gets the labels off and the crud to come out of the bottom of the bottle.  But then I have to rinse, then sanitize (an absolute must!!!).  But the nice part of bottling is the reward of getting all those bottles filled with the beer I made.  Too bad I have to wait another month from bottling for the beer to naturally carbonate before I can drink.
     So tonight I bottled my American Red Ale.  This was one brewed back in the early summer.  I was trying a new method of Partial Mash that I read about online on BYO.com.  I used the AHS (Austin Homebrew Supply) Red Ale Kit, designed for partial mash.  Now I've done these style partial mash kits in the past, but I wanted to try the new method from the BYO article where I use a 2 gallon cooler to mash my grains, as opposed to mashing in a nylon bag inside the brew pot. Unfortunately for me, I followed the BYO directions to a T, even though I have BrewSmith Software and it told me differently.  This led me to perform the batch sparge improperly and I mashed too low a gravity, causing my OG to be 1.034 instead of the kits 1.052 post boil.  But not fretting the issue, and following RDWHAHB (Relax, Don't Worry, Have A Home Brew), into the fermenter it went, along with the yeast.  Then a heatwave hit, and while fermenting, the temps inside the bucket easily hit 85 Degrees F.  Too warm and the fermentation had mostly finished after approx. 4 days.  So, I left it sit for its month as I usually do and transferred it to secondary.  Then I left it sit till today.  When I decided to finally bottle the beast.

     So hopefully the Ale turns out ok, but I won't be surprised if there are off flavors.  Either way a learning experience.

Since that hot fermentation, I've build a fermentation chamber using plans I found online.  The build was quite fun, and the chamber works very well.  Right now, I have a Pumpkin Ale fermenting at a cool 67 Degrees F.  Much better than 85.

Now even though bottling is nice and all, I definitely want to get into kegging my beer in the future.  I know it would save me so much time and energy.  Granted, I'll still bottle a few of each brew, but most of it will be kegged and then put on tap....once I get a bar/kegerator/tap system.

Until next time, Happy Brewing!