nathanjw | batch 32, 33, and 33a

Last week I brewed my first batch since moving to the new apartment. It was a pretty straightforward English bitter, and the brew day went well - having a shaded yard with a picnic table, hose faucet, and an electrical outlet was very nice. That batch was part of a grander plan, however, which took place today. I brewed my biggest beer yet, stretching the limits of my system, and made a barleywine. 22 pounds of grain for about six gallons of beer at 1.100 gravity, and it just about filled my mash tun. When it was cooled and ready for pitching, I racked it directly onto the yeast cake from last week's batch (having decanted that beer into a smaller carboy), and sure enough, it took of fermenting in under two hours. The mash also produced some second runnings, so I made a small beer with the remainder, and got a 3-gallon batch of about 1.040 as a result. So now I have 13-14 gallons of beer, in various versions of English styles, happily fermenting away.

Aside from taking up nine hours and making my back hurt a bit, it was a fine way to spend a day.

UPDATE: Overnight, the barleywine fermented so vigorously that it lost about a gallon of liquid out the blow-off tube. Maybe I would have been better off to make a slightly smaller barleywine batch and then a full-size beer from the second runnings.