What you're looking at are the balances of 3 recent batches. Where's the rest? Well lets first go over what these batches are. On the left we have our first ever batch of Apfelwein. A dry, German apple cider. Easily the cheapest and most delicious alcoholic beverage we will ever create. Total cost to us: $1.00 for the cheap, dry wine yeast. Other ingredients are Apple juice and dextrose (corn sugar). Fortunately for us, I work at a place that has plenty of apple juice concentrate and dextrose thus the lack of cost factor. For reference, the cost of Dextrose is .31/lb (x 2lbs) and apple juice concentrate is about $5/gallon. One gallon concentrate makes 5 gallons single strength so technically the cost of making this is $6.62. Cheap enough to have numerous batches going on all the time. Let's get on it boys! Mix the ingredients together, pour them into the carboy, lets sit a minimum of 4 weeks. Longer is preferred.
In the middle we have Red Ale #4. For me, its red ale # 1, but the recipe was from my brother Nate and his homebrewery, Flightless Bird Brewery. This is his 4th attempt at creating a West Coast style, house red ale. Think Northcoast's Red Seal Ale (sort of.) Mine tastes like a big red IPA. Bitter throughout, especially at first, but there's enough extract in there to sweeten it up and make it go down surprisingly easy. I will tweak the recipe next time and use more than one hop variety and a slightly different hop schedule, but this one is good.
And on the right, a less than fully attenuated Blonde Ale. Too sweet, apple-y, and not a dry enough finish. But 3 gallons were consumed via keg at our annual Halloween party and no one complained, at least not to me. What was supposed to be a blonde ale actually came out looking like Sam Adams' Oktoberfest in color. Orange. Not a repeat brewing offender, although if the yeast finished doing their job, which my opinion is that they didn't, this could be a good beer. Not giving up on brewing a Blonde. I'd love to have one on tap all the time.
So that is the story of the three little beers. Okay, 2 beers and one knock your face off 9.5% apple cider wine that cost next to nothing to make . There's still about 2 gallons of Red Ale #4 on tap in the basement and about 20 or so bottles of Blonde. So come over and pour yourself a glass. Oh, and there is still 2 gallons of Apfelwein on tap also, despite having poured pitchers of it a few weekends ago while playing Beatles Rockband. Good combo, fyi.
In the basement right now? Mish's Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone which is at 4.5% and tasting mighty fine...ready for secondary and dry-hop. And my 5 gallons of Claus Haus Pale Ale (first attempt) at about 4.5% and tasting good, but young. Racking both to secondary this weekend.
In other news, overnight temperatures hit -15 Degrees windchill thus rendering my garage fridge next to useless. As a preemptive strike, Eric and I moved all the beers plus the 2 kegs and CO2 tank into the basement. We finally got the chance to bust out the Monster fridge and put it to use also. Here is the setup:
