Good grief, this sounds cool. (There are more posts on the subject, too, of course, like this one, or these ones, over here, if you search around.)

Like I said, it sounds cool, but a little hard to set up. Sometimes I wish I had a little stronger background with hardware and building stuff. I think I really would like to have a small steam-powered mash/boil setup.

Also, here are some links connected to Belgian beer, which I’m posting here so I can find them again, but which others might appreciate too:

• I always forget to go and check out The Burgundian Babblebelt forum. I shouldn’t.
• an article by Martin Lodhal, on Abbey beer styles.
• I plan on doing like this guy for my next Saison: Rye malt for sure, though maybe more than 11% rye
• Info on the American version of the Pale Ale style… personally, I’m likelier to do a Belgian Pale, but I’m experimenting with styles, so…
• I want to make a collapsible manifold for my cooler, so I can use it as a mash tun… but I can’t find CPVC piping (online… I guess I need to go to the big plumbing market in Seoul, sigh). But this guide to making a coffin mash tun outlines exactly what I will do with the CPVC if I can get my hands on some… ah, the parti-gyles I will do, when I have this set up!

As for my brewing, I have a bunch of recipes I want to try out, but most excitingly I just got six gallons of this apple juice through a friend, and will be making an apple cider. I won’t have a full year to age it, mind, but I will at least have six or seven months for bulk aging it in a keg. That should be enough for it to become very enjoyable, if not absolutely in peak quality. (The bottles I hand out to friends at that time will, conversely, have a note urging them to age it for another six months before drinking.)

The cider-making should happen pretty soon: I’ll be getting a couple of ingredients and things I need (a kilo of white sugar, a small bucket for housing one of my carboys through a long secondary) tomorrow, and the carboy I’ll use for primary fermentation should be sterile by then if I fill it with a bleach solution tonight; likewise, the starter of Apple Cider Yeast I made a while back can be woken up and stepped up in time for pitching tomorrow, once the yeast has been gently woken from its slumber.

Any Korea-side brewers who are after some good apple cider, let me know. I may even end up blending two cider yeasts, since I have two… but the Wyeast apple cider I pitched was so wonderfully flocculative that I may just go with what I already had. Hmm.

In all honesty, the thing I need most is a couple more of those 4L Carlo Rossi wine jugs, for small-batches, mini-mead batches, and experiments. If anyone has one kicking around, I’ll give it a really good home!