The question of what to brew next is a delicate one. I currently have 11 kegs, in two of which I am bulk aging mead of some kind. In eight of the others, I have, or soon will have, a batch of beer, including one beer I am similarly bulk aging (a dark Saison for the fall). The seven other beers are not particularly being reserved for later, not being bulk aged, and they’re not all full — I have one keg with probably a gallon of RyePA left in it, and a Golden Strong Ale that is, really, about …

This morning I racked my Northern Brown Ale to a keg, which left me with a healthy cake of London Ale yeast and I didn’t want to just leave it in the fridge. Given a discovery I made about my attempted ESB (the Cry Havoc yeast was fine, the carboy wasn’t), I decided I’d better keep my promise to Miss Jiwaku and brew up a Mild. So I brewed up this mild. It’s certainly not a beer I’m dreadfully eager to make — not like, say, a big fat Belgian Tripel  — but I am curious to see what a …

I don’t know if this actually is weird, but, for the ESB I am attempting to brew, and which has sat in primary for a week or so now, the yeast behavior in the carboy looks weird. I saw this fully acknowledging that I don’t use the carboys for primary fermentation anywhere near often enough to know whether this is weird or not… but I’ve never seen anything like it. On top of the wort/beer is this thick, almost oily-looking layer of yeast and bubbles: The bubbles are, well, they are bursting only slowly. The airlock, at this point, is …

I posted this on Facebook a while back, but I don’t remember if I posted an announcement here. Tomorrow, in Bundang, my homebrew club will be donating a bunch of beer for a fundraiser to help put together some money for the Red Cross Fund for Japan’s recovery in the wake of last month’s devastating earthquake/tsunami. There are details here. I’m personally donating a keg of Saison and a keg of supposedly-Bavarian wheat beer. (Which doesn’t really taste Bavarian at all, but it’s still beer, and I brewed it specifically for this event!) I would love for any readers to …

Well, I may have screwed up my English mild. (See the update at the end of the post for how it became a Northern Brown Ale.)

“And that he calls for drink, I’ll have prepared for him a chalice for the nonce…” (King Claudius to Laertes, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII) “For the nonce” is a phrase that’s stuck in my head since I first encountered it in Hamlet — not constantly, but it’s a phrase that occurs to me at times, usually when I cannot use it. It was one of those unfamiliar phrases I needed to have explained to me, and when it was explained, I wondered where the hell he’d gotten that word. Turns out there’s a complex etymology behind it, but one suited …

I brewed up a Bavarian Wheat beer on Saturday. A Bavarian wheat is a beer that ought to be strong in the banana and fruity esters (along with some clovey and vanilla phenolics) given off by the particular yeast strain used to make it (which, in this case, was Wyeast’s Bavarian Wheat yeast (Wyeast 3638). I got somewhat poor efficiency with this batch (getting a gravity of about 1.040 instead of 1.048), perhaps because I did this batch brew-in-a-bag or, more likely, because of the less-than-optimal grain crush on both the wheat and the pilsner malt I used. Oddly enough, …