New Brewpot

No update in a while, mainly because I have been graduating/moving back home/going to San Francisco for the last few weeks. Today I bought a turkey fryer to use as a brew pot so I can do full boils. This is a 35 qt. aluminum pot. It's pretty nice. Comes with a spigot on it, and I'm going to look at getting a Counter Flow Chiller to hook up to it.


Also, kegerator is in the works. Slowly acquiring parts.

Batch #2 Picture

Here's a picture of my second batch after it has been poured. I didn't do a great pour, and gave it a little bit too much head. It is the AHS Promotional Amber Ale.

Edit: As far as the tasting goes, I've posted a bit in the past on it and how it has improved over the weeks. It had a good amount of malt flavor and was pretty smooth. It's improved a ton over the last few weeks. Good body and full flavor. Goes down very smooth. Also a note on the color, it is a little bit lighter than this, my camera isn't that great. It is still darker, but is more of an amber color.

Brewing Books

I just picked up the MBAA Practical Handbook for the Specialty Brewer series off books. I'm a couple chapters into the first one, which has primarily talked about water and malting so far. Here's a picture

Batch #4 Bottling

I bottled my fourth batch today, a hefeweizen. It tasted pretty good, a little bit of banana flavor, but not as much as I expected. A little sweet too. The FG was spot on at about 1.012.

A note on the sanitation, I'm not sure if I used proper procedure, and don't know if it will mess up the beer at all. My hope is that since it is a hefe it will be ready before anything has a chance to contaminate it. I used Iodophor to sanitize for the first time, and I didn't realize that you couldn't reuse the solution that much. I also found somewhere telling me to not use hot water with it, which I did, but I didn't find anything telling me why not to use hot water, so I'm not sure.