Couldn't wait ... had to get this thing filled. Read about these Toasted Coconut Porter's in Zymurgy and had to give it a go. 1.5 pounds of flaked coconut and lots of Black Patent and Chocolate malt. Recipe called for White Labs Cry Havoc yeast... which is a lager that ferments at ale temps... should be interesting. Oh... and tried my own yeast starter for a change. And with the conical should be able to collect and save it!
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Well it's only 12.5 gallons ... but we've upgraded from carboy's to a conical fermenter! Totally stoked to add this to our system. The conical will allow is to dump the trub, rack straight to secondary, and even save our yeast! Plus it will be a hell of a lot easier to clean than those carboys. Now all we need is a fermentation chamber to control out temps! Close up of the racking arm and dump.
Fathers Day gift from my two sweethearts... thanks guys! FYI... it's a one handed bottle opener... or grab opener!
So John decided to enter us in this year's home brew competition at the San Diego County Fair! We entered 3 beers, a Belgian Specialty (16E) The Farmer's Daughter, a Belgian Strong Ale (18) Another D'Evil, and a Light Hybrid/Wheat (6D) the Wildfire Wheat. Now we keg out beer, and the competition requires bottles so getting kegged beer into a bottle is a bit tricky. We borrowed our buddy Chuck's Blichmann gun and bottled a bunch of beer not knowing how well it was going to work. Grabbed some labels and caps from GrogTag and sent it in. Without trying to make excuses we pitched the fruit into the Wildfire literally days before, and filtered it immediately before bottling. There was no way this beer was ready, so we really entered 2 beers. Went down to the award ceremony today... The beer is judged on 5 categories... Aroma (12 pts), Appearance, (3 pts), Flavor (20 pts), Mouthfeel (5 pts), and Overall Impression (10 pts). A perfect score is 50. Although we didn't win, we scored a respectable 34 with The Farmer's Daughter and a 34 and 36 with Another D'Evil. The 4th place winner of the Belgian Strong Ale scored a 39. So we were about a point shy in each of the categories from placing.... which I guess isn't so bad. There were almost 50 entries in the category!
Until next year ... Cheers! |