Redcar Brewery » Brewing

Beer Labels

npaci — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:43:06 +0000

With the sour and big beers that have been coming out of the brewery lately, the need for bottling has returned. For a long while we have only been kegging beer, as there is no need to age it. With the return to bottling, the need for labeling has returned. For all the sour beers, a zombie(undead/infection theme) is driving the names. At this point I have a number of labels shown below.

It has been fun watching a consistency in the labels is arise naturally throughout the process of making more and more labels…

Get that beer out of here…

npaci — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:40:56 +0000

So the first of the barrel beers was ready to come out of the barrel on saturday, so a 8 of us showed up with a rough idea of what we were going to do to get the beer out of the barrel and into bottles and carboy’s and home with it’s respective parties. During the process of the barrel emptying we put the time lapse camera on the barrel’s. Next time we will do the bottling session upstairs, where there were 6 of us working at the same time. In the end we bottled 16 cases of beer and sent home 16 gallons in bulk vessels(4 gallons in a carboy with sour cherries), four gallons a keg, and 8 more gallons in two buckets for bottling by the one member of the barrel cabal who has moved on to the west coast.

The beer, a flanders red(back story thanks to mad fermentationist) has a lovely sourness, and tastes better than any commercial sour beer I have had in a while. Just waiting for bubbles now…

Pellicle formation with Peg vs. Airlock

npaci — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:35:32 +0000

Back in may I got a healthy 2nd generation rosalaire yeast slurry from my barrel brewing buddy Zach. The slurry damn near filled up a two liter soda bottle, and feeling adventurus, i whipped up a 10 gallon Oud Bruin based off of JZ’s recipie in Brewing Classic Styles…a month later I racked it off the yeast(well probably mostly bacteria) cake and got it into secondary. The slurry went in the fridge only to be neglected until mid september only to go to yet another barrel brew brother where it seems to have found it’s feet again and ferments madly away in the 80′s on some other flanders esque style beer…

Any way that’s not the point, the point is one of if the wooden peg is worth doing. The thinking behind the wooden peg is that in the context of ration’s the surface area of a simple wooden peg in the opening of the carboy, is roughly equivalent to the surface/volume ration of a full size wine or bourbon barrel. But all of that is debatable without an actual experiment…so here we find ourselves in the asle of home depot looking at oak stair balusters….”one or two?” Well in the name of all things science, we hold off and only buy one, which we then chop down to the right length to dip into the beer, and not stick out of the top of the carboy…initially there was no difference, they both did nothing, but right around a month or so after racking, there started to be the little white pools on the surface of the beer. Then as with all good flanders beers, I forgot about it, not on purpose, just went off and forgot about it properly. During this forgotten time, it was summer(albeit a mild one) in dc, we didn’t run the AC much and it was in a cool dark room. Probably saw low 80′s but mostly mid-70′s due to the nice tile floor in the room it lives in.

When I came back to it, you can see the dramatically different pellicle thicknesses, neither beer looks ropey in any way, just a nice hard looking pellicle. I haven’t tasted either version yet(will do that tomorrow when Alex and I are brewing the beer(a sour belgian single) to replace the flanders red that is ready to come out of the barrel).

In any event, it is interesting to see the difference AND it will be yet another aspect of the oud bruin, cause now I will be blending back the two versions to get the sourness/funkiness to a desired point….another flavor control lever if you will.

Pictures tell it all…

Edit: Thanks to Michael Tonsmeire for part of the inspiration to do half the batch with the peg vs. the other half with the traditional air lock.

Wooden Peg generating a more significant pellicle than a traditional airlock

Traditional Airlock NOT generating the same degree of pellicle

10 gallons of Wee Heavy in under a minute…

npaci — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:17:09 +0000

A little time lapse of a day at the redcar brewery…

Innagural Beer Club Night (*Updated!!)

npaci — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:50:48 +0000

First Night of beer club…start at 7:30(at least noah started around 7-7:15, folks started showing up around 8).

Beer of the evening is a Boddingtons Bitter. This activity on a school night…not sure about it..ended up being a really late night.

Notes about the brew night: had a kink in the herms return hose, undershot the wort volumes by 1 gallon or so, had to use all the trub to get even within 1/2 gallon of the final 10 gallon full volume.

Beer after 12 hours…

Hog Heaven Clone Take II

npaci — Sun, 25 May 2008 16:48:58 +0000

Hog Heaven Clone Attempt #1(time slightly accelerated)

admin — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:59:50 +0000