vw and beer.

Beer Updates:

A week and a half ago I remade the roasted roggenbier.  I used half a pound more rye malt in #2, which should bring more rye character in addition to bumping the starting gravity from 1.050 to 1.054.  I really enjoyed the first rendition, so I am eagerly anticipating the second.  The majority of the keg might end up at the Sublime Ale House holiday party though as a part of my continued effort to build some street cred...We'll see how it turns out before I get ahead of myself.

Mashing and about to remove the oil filter. 

During the mash and mash-out I multi-tasked like crazy and changed the oil in the camper.  Its had 5000 miles put on the new engine already, adds up a lot faster than you think.  Of all the cars I've owned so far, the camper is by far the easiest to change the oil.  It has plenty of clearance off the ground, and the drain plug and filter are within easy reach from the back.

The porter is done and needs to be moved to a keg.  It has a lot of roasted chocolate flavor, I am excited to see how carbonation changes and mellows out the roasted malt bitterness. 

Uncarbonated sample of saison #1(name tbd)

Racking Saison to a keg to mix with bottling sugar.

I haven't naturally carbonated a beer in a long time, and the last time I didn't own a beer gun.  I have however bottled a lot of carbonated beer, especially recently, and the beer gun is essential.  It only made sense to use a keg as a bottling bucket and bottle out of it with the beer gun.  I can still purge bottles with CO2 and push it out of the keg.  I suppose people who use a bottling bucket would call this a waste of CO2, but it really isn't very expensive, and my 20lb tank lasts a long time. 

$60 Colana Capper/Corker

My new corker along with all the necessary supplies for bottling.  I thought about doing a step by step writeup of our corking experience, but I would just be copying all the information I found here: Brew Your Own - Corking Belgians.  It is a very well written article, and is one of the reasons I bought the corker I did. 

Watch out! She has a beer gun.

For our first belgian bottling attempt, I think it went very well.  Jammie filled the bottles, I corked them, and we both went back and put wire cages on them.  I had done quite a few practice runs with the corker to get the cork in the right amount, but we hadn't tried putting cages on them, luckily you can just take it off and try again with a new one.  I ordered 100 of both belgian corks and wire cages, so we had a few to mess up.

Jammie twisting a wire cage on to hold that cork in.

Although I haven't had any of the saison in carbonated form, I am very happy with how the bottling process went.  Bottling uncarbonated beer is substantially easier, enjoyable, and way less messy than carbonated beer.  I might just do this for a lot more beers in the future. 

More beer related news:

Here is a sweet write-up from a beer blog about a beer vending machine.  Pretty awesome concept and I am impressed with the execution.  


Moped update:  The Peugeot still needs to be re-timed,  which requires a flywheel puller which I haven't ordered yet.   The pinto is running the best it has since I've owned it.  It is pulling great off the line and accelerates steadily to 40 mph.  It is very exciting to have finally tuned it to a good point and makes it a lot of fun to ride.  The idle is still a little rough, but I took it for a 4 or 5 mile ride the other day and it ran great and although the idle will go down really low it never dies.

Cheers!