Decided to put a little blurb on some additions I've added to my brewery in the last few months. First off, I am now able to mill my own grains. This allows me to use the freshest grains possible in each of my brews since the milling takes place in a matter of minutes before I start my mash. I went the cheap route and picked up a Corona style mill off of ebay for around $25. It took a little tweaking to get the plates spaced apart to the correct gap so that I mill/crack and not grind my grains into flour. I also added one of those pieces of duct that attach to a floor vent for your central heating and air systems. This allows me to mill up to about 5lbs at a time. Then I removed the hand crank and attached a drill directly into the mill. I'm actually milling at a higher speed than I should since I have no way of slowing down the drill, but it seems to be working fine. In the future I'd like to get a 1/2 or 1/3 HP motor geared down so that I will get 175 to 200 rpms. This would allow me to dump in 5lbs and walk away or do something else. As it it now I have to hold the drill, obviously.


I have also added a scale with a custom, one of a kind weighing contraption. Actually it's just a bucket cut almost in half, but it works! The scale will weigh up to 10lbs, but the bucket only holds about 5lbs before the grains start to spill out the front. And that's fine since the hopper on my mill only holds 5lbs.

As far as the scale goes I'm pretty happy with it. I may lower the table the mill is attached to and hang the scale directly above it so I can weigh the grains and then dump them direclty into the hopper.


*Sorry about the crappy pics. I'll replace with good ones once I have them.*

I just popped open the California Common I bottled last Saturday during the Strong Ale boil. It has only been carbonating for about five days now but I wanted to give it a try to see if it would be ready to take to the homebrew club meeting we're having Saturday. I opened it and poured it into my glass and to my pleasent surprise it is pretty well carbonated. I think it is pretty good. It has a sweet aroma, maybe floral which I think comes from the Northern Brewer hops, but to be honest it smells a little more like a malt sweetness. So, I'm unsure of the aroma as of now. It's fairly clear as you can see by the picture. The head was white and didn't stay around long. Not much lacing of the glass. I think this will make a pretty good session beer. Especially at only 4.55% ABV. One issue with this is the fact that there are so few commercial examples of the style it's hard to tell if I'm on the money with this one. I have a few Anchor Steam Beers in my fridge and they're ok, not my favorite. They don't taste much like this beer though, so I'm wondering if this is on the mark when it comes to style. I'll probably send this one off to the next competition when I enter one so we'll see what some BJCP judges have to say. The kit that I bought for this one from Northern Brewer came with 3 oz of NB hops. I ended up omiting 1oz of them because I was affraid it would be too hoppy. I think I'm glad I did now since the bitterness of this beer does seem to be inline with style, at least with the Anchor counterpart.

I wrapped up brewing my strong ale this Saturday that I had to cut short earlier this week. I listened close while I was removing the bung to see what kind of sound it made. I'm pretty sure I heard the sound of air rushing INTO the carboy. This suggests that since I put hot wort into it then it cooled down and created a vacuum. If it had made he sound of air rushing OUT of the carboy there would have been some sort of bacterial or wild yeast at work in there. I'm hopeful that this beer will turn out good in the long run. This is one I'll be aging so if something did go wrong I'll have to wait a few months before I find out unless is obvious at the initial tasting. But from what I've heard strong beers are pretty bad when they first come out of fermentation.
Right now my plan is to bottle some and rack some into a 5L mini keg with some oak chips for a few months. I just need to find out how much oak I need to put in there so it doesn't over power the beer.

Also, since the strong ale was a 90 minute boil and the hop additions were at 90 and 30 mins I had an hour of down time that I decided to use to bottle my California Common. I have to say that was the first beer that I wanted to drink the enitre hyrometer sample from. Really looking forward to this one carbing up and being ready to drink.

Well, I started my Strong Ale tonight and about half way thru the mash started feeling ill. I thought about it for a while a decided to take the run off of the mash and store it all in a 6.5 gallon carboy and stop the brew session right there. We'll see what happens to the wort I guess. I'm considering adding a campben tablet to it to sterilize the wort while it's sitting. It will probably be around 50f in the room it's in so it won't be cold enough to keep the nasties from getting to it.

We'll see what happens after I boil it up. I'll post results asap.