I spent most of the morning racking my three different beers that have been fermenting or conditioning over the past few weeks.
First, I sanitized one of my carboys and cracked the lid on the Dogfish Head 60 Minute clone. It smelled pretty good and hoppy. Racked the beer into the carboy, and dry hopped with 2 ounces of Cascade and Willamette. I’d originally planned on Cascade and Simcoe, but I decided I didn’t want that super piney, grapefruit thing going on with this one. It’s also the first time I’ve just dropped the hops right into the carboy, as opposed to using a nylon bag, so we’ll see how it affects the clarity of the final product. It’s kind of cool seeing about two beautiful inches of thick, bursting hops soaking in your beer. I’ll give it at least a couple weeks to marinate until I bottle.
Cascade
Next, I sanitized my corny keg and transferred my Spiced Pumpkin Ale that’s been in secondary for a couple weeks. Smelled great. Pretty sweet, which I’m sure is from the brown sugar. But hopefully doesn’t taste too sweet. Once I filled the corny, I hooked it up to CO2, burped it, and gave it a 20 psi shot for a few minutes before I dropped it down to 7, then refrigerated. I’ll give it a taste later tonight to see how we’re coming along.
Finally, I racked the recently brewed Summit Winter clone into a sanitized carboy to condition for a bit. Nice toffee brown coloring, which is just about spot on with the real thing.
So, in total, that’s about 15 gallons of good homebrew that I’ll soon be adding to my craft beer rotation. Can’t wait.
DFH 60 Clone with Dry Hop
November 11, 2008 at 1:01 pm
This will be my hobby when Delia gets out of daycare or we rake in more money. About how much is it to home brew?
November 11, 2008 at 1:46 pm
That’s a tough one to answer…if you’re talking about getting the equipment, you can get a simple starter kit (buckets, siphon, bottle capper, etc.) that’ll run you about $80. Then you need your ingredients…most extract recipe kits are between $25-30, and make a 5 gallon batch (about 2 and a half cases of beer). All-grain brewing is a little more complicated, and expensive. But once you invest in the equipment, all-grain recipe ingredients could cost as low as $15 for a 5 gallon batch of quality craft brew. So it all depends.
November 24, 2008 at 10:00 pm
[...] use and brewing that barleywine. Looking forward to it. I’m also planning to bottle the DFH 60 Minute IPA and Summit Winter Ale clones that have been sitting in secondary for at least a couple weeks, and rack the Saison I brewed over [...]