I got the last three batches of reception beer (the red ale and two batches of hefeweizen) kegged today. I’m not able to fit all five kegs in the freezer so I’ve got one of the hefes cooling down and carbonating in the main keg fridge. The other four are in the chest freezer, with the temperature set at around 50F. I’ll move the CO2 over some time later on in the week and get the rest of them carbonated. As for now, I’m totally beat. Moving 50 – 60 pound carboys and kegs around for a few hours wears on you.
Author Archives: Pat
Reviving Our Date Nights
With the wedding coming up and all of the stress around it, we’ve let our date nights lapse. That’s not good, so we’re starting them back up. Tonight we headed up to Denton to check out The Abbey Inn, a pub on the city square. They’ve got a great selection of local beers on tap, including the yummy IPA by (512) brewing company that I had. The food was delicious, and the service was excellent. We’ll definitely be going back there in the near future.
After that we went over to Beth Marie’s for some tasty ice cream before doing a little shopping. First we went to Mad World Records to look for some music for the wedding reception. We found the [amazon_link id=”B000002IQI” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Marc Cohn[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”B004WOXM5K” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]Dawes[/amazon_link] albums we were looking for, so that was time well spent. Then we hit Recycled Books and managed, somehow, to bring back even more books to add to the ever growing “to read” stack.
The Last Reception Brew Is Done
Well, mostly done. I finished brewing it and pitched the yeast a couple hours ago. It’s in the freezer, hopefully there’s not too much of a lag time before the yeast kicks off. I saved the hefeweizens for last because they need the least amount of aging. Two weeks from now they go in kegs and we’re done. I’m beat, and this isn’t even close to the workload a professional brewer has.
Kegging The Reception Beers
The first two batches of beer for the wedding reception, the brown ale and the stout, are now in kegs. All in all, the chest freezer fermentation chamber and the Better Bottles worked out better than I expected. The only hitch was that I started running low on CO2 while purging the kegs. So I ran down to Mr. G’s and picked up a second five pound cylinder. Now I shouldn’t get caught with no CO2 again.
Wedding Reception Beer 3 – Red Ale
This morning I did probably the most technically challenging beer of the set, the red ale. I haven’t had much luck with them, consistently turning out brown ales instead of getting that red color. When I was at Homebrew Headquarters picking up the ingredients, I got some tips on another way to do it. So instead of steeping the roasted barley along with the rest of the specialty grains, I waited until everything was out and I was bringing it up to a boil. At that point, I put just the roasted barley in a hop sack and repeatedly dunked it until I got a color that looked good. It may be a little light, but it’s going to be a lot closer to red than my previous attempts. Yeast has been pitched and it’s in the old fermentation chamber since the stout and brown ale are still in the chest freezer. They’ll get kegged tomorrow or Monday and then I’ll be ready to do the hefeweizens.
Picked Up A Chest Freezer For Brewing
Mike let me know about a deal on a chest freezer at the local Sears. I’ve been wanting one for a while and with all the brewing that I’ve got to do for the wedding reception, it was needed. It’s an 8.8 cubic foot model, which will comfortably hold two carboys, meaning I’ll be able to get all the reception beers done. Now I’ve got to pick up the temperature controller and other parts and ingredients for the first beers and then get started.
Reese’s Birthday Trip – Day 9
Reese, Heather, and I went in to Pigeon Forge to ride some go-carts. Thanks to Aunt Sandy, we had some free passes to use up, enough for two races for each of us. Reese smoked us totally on the first one, which he really enjoyed. He then wanted to do one of the other rides, a trampoline like thing where he was hooked up to rubber bands to help him jump even higher. He caught some really good air, but didn’t quite have the concept of flips down. He could do them, but couldn’t quite get himself straightened out before landing. The guy running the ride was great, he really worked with Reese and kept him up there for a lot longer than I expected. We both shot some video of him, and I’ll get around to posting it at some point. After that, we did our second race on the go-carts and then went inside to enjoy some air conditioning and play some skee ball. Between the three of us we got enough tickets for Reese to bring home a hackey sack.
We then headed back to the lake, had some great food for dinner, set off the last of our fireworks, and packed up to head out in the morning.
Reese’s Birthday Trip – Day 8
We went in to Maryville with Heather and the aunts to get some steamed sandwiches and run some errands before heading over to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to do the Roaring Fork trail with Reese. We were hoping that there was going to be some water flowing thanks to the storms last night. It wasn’t as much as I was hoping, but it was still good. Reese is getting comfortable with the new camera and got some good pictures. We hiked over a bunch of rocks to get to some good picture taking spots as well as some of the easier stopping points.
Reese at Roaring Fork
After we got back we had some dinner and then sang happy birthday and had some birthday cake and ice cream.
Reese’s Birthday Trip – Day 7
Reese and I headed back in to Pigeon Forge to play some putt-putt before running some other errands. We got two rounds in before the heat made us give up and seek some air conditioning and lunch. After that we stopped off to pick up a birthday gift for Heather and some birthday cake for Reese. Then it was back to the lake to hang out and enjoy some steak. We had some excitement before dinner was ready. One of the worst wind storms hit the area. There’s apparently lots of damage in town with lots of trees down and power outages all over the place. We lost a few pieces of skirting around the trailer and the jet skis and floats drifted away, but other than that it was just really windy here.
Reese’s Birthday Trip – Day 6
We went in to town to pick Heather up from the airport and meet up with her mom for lunch. On the way out we picked up some more mortar shells for tonight’s fireworks fun. After doing a little work around her house, cutting trees and picking up brush, we came back to the lake and had a little dinner before getting the launcher tubes set up. The fireworks were great, those shells really looked good. Reese was really safe, paying attention to what was going on around him and letting us know when he was lighting stuff off. We set off over 60 shells, about evenly divided between the two of us, and a bunch of stick rockets. After the last shell was set off we cleaned up as best we could in the dark and turned in for the night.