Brewing in January? Outside?

Okay, so we did manage to pick the warmest day in January to make some beer out in the Minetola garage. But even colder temperatures would not have stopped us from igniting the burners and boiling up some homebrews.

I'll let the pictures do most of the talking. Look at the steam rising out of the pots! My garage smelled like a brewery for two days afterward. My wife and kids weren't as happy with that result as I was, though.

Together, we brewed 40 gallons of beer on that particular Saturday. Bruce brought his new 10-gallon kettle and really impressed us all. It seems like size does matter. He plans to modify the burner mechanism to add support to the kettle. Elevating the burner will allow him to open the valve at the bottom and fill the fermentor buckets without needing to lift the kettle beforehand.

This event was the last time Tom Adams brewed with the club. He was chosen to make a club brew in my new 4-gallon brew pot, requiring more attention that the other 7-gallon kettles. Needless to say, he was quite diligent, never straying far from his station. The fear of allowing a boil-over in front of your peers is a strong motivating factor.

Tom also treated us to a cornie keg of the last batch of beer ever made at the Detroit Brew Factory. He talked Bob the Brewer into opening up the doors on the Saturday after the business closed. Together, they fired up the double-batch brew kettle and drained the last of what remained in the drums of extract. Their ingredients loosely followed the Stanley Red that appeared regularly on tap at the brewery. It was so good, I had to taste it several times.

Pat Scanlon, manager of Royal Oak Brewery, dropped in to see the activities. He brought a growler full of yeast drawn from one of the brew kettles the previous night. Pat suggested that, in a future brewing event, we may consider making an all-grain mash from which each brewer then modifies to suit his (or her, if we can ever find a female who likes the aroma of boiling wort) individual tastes during the boil. (See related notes on the February meeting.)

At each DBF brewing event, a homebrewer can always provide some new tricks and tips to share. In the report from last October, there are some photos of the stainless steel collander that fits inside of the brew pot. I dunno, I guess some people put turkeys in these things. Go figure! Into this collander, though, Ed and Skip prefer to place steeping socks filled with grains and tied at each end. They remove the grain sock merely by lifting out the collander.

Matt Falor takes this concept one step further by lining the collander with the mesh. This concept had been suggested at the October meeting, but this is the first time I have seen anyone using this method.

The final picture shows Bruce, um, draining his main - er, uh, well... Enough said.