Food, Beer, Cooking, and Homebrewing

Not bad for ten hours of work. I brewed a Blond, a Stout, and an American Brown. The Blond will get some strawberry extract to make like a strawberry shortcake. All of these will be going to the Moss Rock Festival in Birmingham, AL on the first weekend in November. I'll be pouring at The Covert Hops Society table. I'm really happy with the speed that I go on my system. I mashed in at 6:30 am, and if I was brewing one batch I would have been done before 10 am. Having the brewing water heat overnight is invaluable. Plus being able to chill below 80 F again is great.

Pics from this years Emerald Coast Beer Fest. We had a great time as always. The weather was perfect.

Sanitizing the jockey box before heading down to the Emerald Coast Beer Fest. I can't wait to see all of my homebrewing buddies from around the southeast.

Since we had the long weekend, and it finally cooled off a bit this weekend, I decided to have a fire. I cooked all of our food for the week over the fire. I really enjoy cooking over a fire. There is something primal about it. I made roasted potatoes, roasted carrots, green beans, peppers and onions, grilled corn, chicken breast, pork chops, and a flank steak. I also grilled some Conecuh sausage to eat while we cooked. Conecuh Sausage is a sausage company in southern Alabama, and they make AMAZING sausages. It's a taste of home to people from this part of the world.

The boss lady and the boys got treated to a full on breakfast over the long weekend. Scratch made biscuits, bacon, cheese grits, French pressed coffee, and eggs to order. Not a bad way to wake up.

Transferring my beer for The Emerald Coast Beer Fest to a new keg. I used the original keg as a brite tank. Also a keg with a red handle is much easier to spot in a sea of kegs.

Bottling my Belgian Quad with some help from Dr. Pasteur.

Pics from our The Covert Hops Society unofficial group brew. Since we added the HERMS coil I wanted to test it out. It worked like a charm. The coil is 1/2 inch by 50 feet and we were getting a 4 degree F change across the coil. Also for kicks I setup my bucket heater overnight with 50 gallons of water in the HLT. It was able to get the 50 gallons up to 132 degrees. I was pretty happy with it.

The boss lady had a big birthday, and as a surprise I booked a long weekend at the Greyfield Inn on Cumberland Island. The island was owned by the Carnagies back in the day. One of the houses they build was turned into an inn during the 1960's. There are only 15-20 guest on the island at a time with maybe 100 people on the whole island. Being able to walk out on a beach and not see anyone else is wonderful. The solidified was priceless. One thing I had about going to the beach is all of the people. They have bikes that you can take whenever and wherever you want on the island, outside of the few houses of the current descendants of the Carnagies. They also have kayaks that you can take out. They suggest that you stay away from the submarine base though. The Atlantic Fleet's ballistic missile submarines are based just across the bay. They also have all of the beach chairs and umbrellas that you could want. I cannot speak highly enough about the inn and all of the staff. The inn was amazing and beautiful. The staff was amazing. There are a lot of self service things at the inn like the bar... yeah about that... but the staff is always helpful and attentive to your needs. They are not overbearing. I like staff being helpful, but I like doing things myself. The food and beverage programs are top notch. Everything we ate was perfect, and the drinks were wonderful. It might cost a little extra over the other barrier islands, but it was worth every penny.

Finally got our club pump mounted on a platform. It's so nice to have the pump on a stand where it will not flop around.

Shrimp and grits is great, but sometimes you got to throw your hands in the air, and wave ‘em like you just don’t care, and get down with all that pimp shit… ATLien…

Skirt steak for tacos... doesn't suck

I brewed a Blond ale that I will be taking to the Emerald Coast Beerfest in a couple weeks. It's Two Row and Munich with a bunch of late addition Azacca. I'll throw a couple ounces in dry hop too. It's a good beer for a public festival in the heat. I also got to play with my new toy. I also love the Chef Alarm from Thermoworks. I already have inline thermometers so I can keep an eye o the temperature of things, but having the Chef Alarm lets me walk away and take care of other task. For example while coming up to a boil I set it to alarm at 205 degrees F. I walked away to clean the mash tun and didn't have to worry about boil over. Plus I like throwing an extra thermometer in my system. I did use it to keep an eye on my Ranco. I use the Ranco to control my heat stick for heating my HLT overnight and while recirculating my mash. They were within a degree of each other. I can't sing the praises of heating overnight enough. I woke up to all 15 gallons of water at 155 degrees F, just what I wanted. I was mashed in and recirculating before 7:15 am. I was finished my 12:15. In the Southeastern US during the summer being done before the afternoon is a must. Also since I had my bag of Columbus hops open I parsed out the hops we need for the next group brew on our club system...

Doctor Pasteur and I are excited about our new brewing toy. He is just more excited about the box. It's going to be really nice having the Chef Alarm to help monitor temperatures in the brewery. It's really cool that they offer a water proof probe. I also got the 12 inch probe.

I made some upgrades to our club system this weekend.

When we upgraded from our old system we lost the HERMS coil. We added the new HERMS coil to our HLT. It’s ½ inch by 50 feet. It should do a much better job with the 50 gallon batches than my personal HERMS coil could.

We also added a whirlpool arm to the boil kettle. It will be really nice to have this. We had been using whirlpool arm that clamped over the top of the kettle.

I did give everything a good cleaning with some hot PBW. No telling what was left over from the manufacturing process. Plus the cutting oil from drilling the holes kind of needed to get cleaned up… Of course the plate chiller got hooked up for the PBW.

There was only one small leak, and it just needed some extra teflon tape on the fitting. Drilling 3 holes in our system can be nerve wrecking so it was nice that everything went so well.

I brewed a Belgian Quad last weekend. A couple weeks ago I brewed a Belgian Blond. I repitched the yeast from the Blond into the Quad. The brew day went really smoothly. Of course Dr. Pasteur says that was because he inspected everything beforehand. One of the ways that I know it's summer is that I can hardly chill. 78 F was the lowest I could go. My fermentation fridge will handle the rest. Luckily it was already cold from cold crashing my previous beers. I also got a new burner because my old one was getting clogged up, and it was producing a lot of soot. It was nice to have a clean burning burner again. I was all cleaned up by 12:30 on the dot. It's a must when the high is over 95 F and the humidity is through the roof.

Our new HERMS coil. I'm really excited to have a correctly sized coil for our club system. We have been using mine, but it's sized for five-ten gallon batches. It couldn't really keep up with a 50 gallon batch. Now to go punch some holes in a couple $800+ pots.