Busy, busy weekend!
First we racked our American wheat from the primary fermentor to the secondary fermentor. Then we bottled our Irish Red, 53 bottles. Finally, we boiled our Honey Weizen and put it in the primary. The Honey Weizen was a do-over of the one that we (think we) ruined. It went really well. So, we have 3 batches (15 gallons) of beer in various stages in the process. We also have the mead with 5 weeks to go in the secondary.
Psycho Dad,
I think I'm too ignorant to know the difference between a partial and full boil. We are still doing Northern Brewery kits, since we are novices. I can say that our boils have been 60 minutes in every instance. As for the burned one, we had quarter-sized flakes of black char floating through the batch for the entire boil. I used a hand-held strainer to trap most of them as they boiled past, but there were a lot of them. We moved from our boiling pot to the primary by racking into the filter funnel. This caught most/all of the sediment. I think if this had happened to us a few months from now, we would have been more inclined to take the chance and keep going. The other problem was that it was our first wheat extract beer and it hyper-fermented the first night, out of the airlock and all over the lid and plastic floor mat. We had a terrible mess the next morning. Since then, we've made an overflow valve - but our nervousness about the taste just made us scrap it rather than put that many more hours into racking and bottling.
Our cooling is taking about 45 minutes using the ice method, but it's very labor intensive. I'm thinking the wort chiller is a great investment, but by the looks of them, it looks like they'd be difficult to keep clean. Sanitizing is easy, obviously, but it seems you get particulate matter between the coils.
Snowy,
We should trade some hops/rhizomes for some brew!
We've used Willamette in one or two of our recipes already. I have some friends who have a cabin in the mountains, and we can grow hops there, if our climate is too harsh for what we want to grow. There seem to be varieties which will grow here, though. I'm trying to ease the wife into this, so an immediate 20 ft trellis might be too shocking!
When I pondered this endeavor, I was thinking the whole house would smell like beer for weeks and it would be a giant mess and all, but it's really been pretty easy. The only day it smells like warm beer in the house is on boil day. After that, it smells a bit on racking and bottling day. All the other time, it's sealed up and you wouldn't even know - just a bucket in the corner.
We are in the process of designing our first labels for the Irish Red. We've also found a nice summer beer in the store - Lienenkugel Sunset Wheat. We are going to try to clone it. This will be our first non-kit beer. I've got my crack R & D staff working on a recipe as we speak. He tells me he only needs to drink 10 or 11 more of them to get the recipe just right, but I think there's something fishy going on.