I’m putting a bunch of posts here to catch up with everything that’s happened since I last posted two months ago.
I should let everyone know that I have yet another blog that I maintain with my buddy Matt called bamfbeer.com
The purpose is to keep up with our adventures in home brewing. There’s a lot going on. We started brewing with one coleman cooler, one keg, one carboy, and a burner. It was run purely on gravity, we chilled the wort with a counterflow chiller Matt made 12 years ago, and we sparged by pouring water over an upside down cereal bowl to sprinkle water over the mash. The setup served us well, but was labor intensive. We found ourselves getting less motivated to make beer because of that, and we actually didn’t brew at all for an entire season.
Then I ran into a buddy of my father-in-law’s who needed to get rid of some kegs, and I figured I’d better take them, because free kegs are unheard of, and very useful for brewing. Then I found a pump on sale at northernbrewer.com and thought “hey, we might have something here”. Then I started looking at all of the stuff people were doing to make their lives easier. I was inspired. We bought a pump, a new wort chiller, and a sparge arm, and we planned to brew a red ale. Our pump was a lemon, but everything else worked really well!
Long story short, the red ale is fermenting nicely in my basement, and we’re planning to brew a nice bitter sometime this month. In the meantime, there’s new pump on its way, and Matt got his hands on an old utility cart made from angle iron that might make it possible to create a sort of “brewery on wheels”. Matt’s also going to work on a steam injection setup, and we’re on our way!