Now that I have a few beers in fermenters, and a few of the experiments already in bottles, it looks like I'm getting into a weekly rotation. This weekend, I'm bottling the Wheat, Putting the Barleywine in secondary (more on that in a minute), and brewing the third iteration of the Porter (more on that coming up as well). The following weekend, the Pale gets bottled, and the first Brown gets brewed. After that, A regular, weekly schedule of tasting, bottling, and brewing goes into place except for a one or two week break while I'm on vacation. I'm hoping this schedule will speed up the experiments without confusing me too much...because I get confused easily.
The Barleywine, as I said above, is scheduled to go into secondary for conditioning/ bulk aging, this weekend, but I checked the gravity, and it is still kind of stuck at about 14 points over where it should be...my first stuck fermentation. I have to look around online, but I think tossing in some new yeast in secondary may help out. I've heard of some brewers using champagne yeast as well, but I'm not sure I want to do that.
With the Porter, I think I may have broken my original plan of changing just a small aspect with each batch by reducing the black patent and adding a relatively large amount of Crystal all at once. I actually liked the first example more, so I'm going to bump the Black Patent back up to the original level, and just add a charge of Crystal 40 to combat the sharpness I was trying to soften out.
I really can't wait to get this going on a weekly basis. I love seeing how these ideas effect the final product. Even better, however, is when I go to a brewpub or taste a commercial beer, and can pick out certain ingredients because I've tried so many of them so many times. I'm having a blast.
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