Coming up on Memorial day, so we I got a four day weekend coming up. We are totaly unprepared as usual. Gots almost no beer kegged. All I have is about 2 pints of the Cream Ale left. But the stout is ready to be kegged. I hopefully will be doing that tonight, after going to get a load of firewood for the weekend. Because its a stout means a couple good things. It wont have to be super carbed,, and I will prolly be the only one drinking it. I do have a bit of the Old Republic left, but saving that for our next Rackers meeting.

 

Seeing that I have that 4 day er, I better brew something. So Friday I am going to brew a beer that I havent brewed in quite a while, and even then it was an extract. Woot!zenbock. I bumped it up to a 5 gallon batch,, but will need to partial mash it because my mash tun is only a 5 gallon. I also changed the recipe a bit, because back then I had no idea what a bock beer was supposed to be like, so now I know and that recipe seems to be off just a bit.  The only dark grains were a bit of special B, so I added a bit more of chocolate malt to color it.

Still have to get going on more Crop Circles. Possibly Saturday. Need to get er up and going so its ready for the 4th. Shouldn't be a problem though.

Thats what on the ready. Will post the full recipe on the Friday brew day

After sitting and looking at all this stuff we got , and have had growning, I got a little pissed at my self for not fermenting it. Sheesh when we were kids we made wine outta everything we could find. Apples, pears, rice … Now I'm sitting here looking at rhubarb, red currents, and never thought about using them. Well maybe my currants, but those are going into a wheat beer later on.

 

I think I get asked about 5 times a day this time of year if I want any rhubarb, and always say no. But this year I'm gonna take all I can get. I havent made rhubarb wine in quite a while, but I'm guessing I'm gonna use the same basic procedure, but this time I have better equipment.

 

Here is what I plan on doing. 3 gallon batches. 

-chop and Freeze my rhubarb. thinkin maybe 7-8-9 lbs. (estimating)

-thaw it out and put into bucket dump about 4 lbs sugar on it and let sit in a cool spot for 2 days (maybe brown sugar)

-heat up 3 1/2 water. (Hot, not boiling) again estimating. and dump over the rhubarb and sugar mixture that is prolly looking all soupy by now.

-strain all that out. cool,  and put into fermenter with oh I dunno, a cup of rasins and a cut up lemon and wine yeast.

-secondary

-bottle, Gonna use bombers

 

Ah yea. just like the good old days,, but better. Gotta get home and make some space for this

I was looking for an app for brewing for my Ipod. Well maybe not for brewing,, more for recipes i guess. One of the first one suggested to me was the Brew Pal app.

Nice little Prog. Does what I wanted to do. Create recipes, calculate mash water temps and volumes. Timers, pitch rates, charts, exporting … even a style guide for when you make a new recipe off the top of your head it will suggest a style that it matches. Lots of neat things in one place. And cheap. $0.99, so it wont break your bank.

I put in a few recipes, an even used its software to brew. Well, started to. Quickly found that the numbers were nowhere near what they should be. I thought I dialed in my equipment into the prog fairly well, but still way off. But the deal breaker was the crashing, crashing, crashing. Could not keep it running no matter what I tried. I’m certain that the next patch will address it, but until then its pretty useless to me. So right in the middle of a batch, I dumped it.

Started looking for another app to fill in, and soon found ibrewmaster Right along the same lines as Brew pal, but it just feels more organized. Everything your looking for is right where you would expect it to be. I like the calanders section where you can keep track of the brews that are in progress. Especially if you have multiple batches fermenting, keeping track of thier progress is easy.

The timers are pretty much straight forward, mash timers, hop schedules. Oh and come loaded with a ton of Northern Brewer recipes.

I have used both Brew Pal and ibrewmaster, and would take the ibrewmaster as they stand right now. But if Brew Pal ever fixes the crash thing I will check them out again.