How to Clear Your Beer with Gelatin
This is a topic I’ve brushed on before, but I get plenty of questions about it. So I decided to do a full post dedicated to my favorite fining agent: gelatin. If you ask people their feelings on using gelatin to fine beer, you’ll get a number of different opinions. Personally, I find it invaluable to clear my beer quickly. Fining one’s beer with gelatin isn’t difficult, but it does require a few specific steps. Here’s the process I’ve had success with.
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eHERMS – Making some progress
Well, my HERMS build is moving along. One of the biggest hurdles with the system was figuring out how I was going to GFCI protect it. 50a GFCIs are $100+, and the range won’t run properly on one. 30a GFCIs are $65, and the dryer won’t run properly on one either. Also, since we rent, I don’t want to make any permanent changes to the condo. The plan was to buy a 50a GFCI Spa Panel. Use a 50a range cord to connect it to the wall outlet, and another 50a range cord to go from the spa panel to the control box. That would have cost around $125 just to get power into my control box, and I would still have to pull the range out from the wall, unplug the cord(that’s all the way down by the floor), and plug in the spa panel every time I brew.
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Building a HERMS system
Over the next couple months I’m going to be building two HERMS brewing systems. One that’s primarily propane, and one that’s all-electric (for now at least). Yes, this does sound a little strange considering I already brew on a HERMS system as I detailed here. Well, my good friend Greg and I share that brew system. It’s a mixture of his parts and my parts, and it’s turned out some great beers over the past couple years. It’s been particularly nice for me, as I live in a small, up-stairs condo, with a small kitchen, and no backyard. Having propane burners and a back porch to brew on has been fantastic.
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Experimental Hop Pale Ale
I was placing an order for hops with Farmhouse Brewing Supply when I noticed they had some experimental hops in stock — HBC 342. Impulse kicked in, and I bought around 12 ounces to play with. The spec sheet of the hops is here, but to summarize, they are a fairly high-alpha hop with a “pleasant aroma” described as “citrusy and watermelon”. That sounds good. So I took my standard Pale Ale recipe, and replaced all the hop additions with HBC 342, only changing the bittering charge to keep the IBUs the same.
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A Very Happy Birthday!
I have some great friends. Thank you guys for some great gifts, and a fun night!
Back from Austria
My Girlfriend (now fiance) and I just got back from an 11 day trip to Austria. We had an absolute blast. Saw some beautiful places, ate some great food, drank some great beer, and I suppose most importantly, got engaged!
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Black Rye West Coast IPA
My Black Rye IPA is finally on tap, and tasting delicious. I had talked about the recipe here, and I found out shortly after I brewed this, that Firestone Walker is brewing nearly the same damn beer. Now I’ll be honest, I had heard they were brewing a Black Rye IPA, but I had no idea our recipes would be so flipping close. Their beer is a little bigger (8.5% ABV), looks to be a little less dark, and uses a slightly different malt bill, but it still looks remarkably similar.
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IPA Tasting Night
Beer reviews aren’t something I ever intend to post, as there are a million blogs that do just that. But this isn’t exactly a review, and it’s worth sharing. Two weekends ago, my friends and I, had an IPA and chicken-and-waffles night. One of my friends makes knock-out chicken and waffles from scratch, and I happened to have a fridge full of awesome IPAs.
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Equipment Calibration
I don’t need to stress how much science is involved in brewing. We’re constantly taking measurements, temperature readings, and gravity readings. After running into various issues that didn’t make much sense, I learned that much of my equipment wasn’t calibrated correctly. My hydrometer was off, my thermometer was off, even my water level measurements were off.
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IPA Clone Series
As hard as I try, I never get sick of IPAs; it just doesn’t happen. I can drink IPAs all night, and still crave an IPA the next day. I’m probably in the minority here, but my taste buds are always craving something extraordinarily hoppy. In Vinnie Cilurzo’s words, I’ve definitely had a lupulin threshold shift.
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