Beaker Beer

Been doing some brewing the last few weeks.  I broke down and did the last two beers with malt extracts, but still have a lot malted barely to go.

This is some of about sixty pounds I malted last year.  Some of it was over-malted because I wasn't turning it enough, but most of it came out pretty decent. 

I think I have some basic malts down.  My crystal malt is crystalline, pale is pale and I have some darker malts that are close.

I'll never use this method again.  Rather than using a mash tun, I tried this ridiculous idea using liter jars to control the mash temperature.  Instead of doing this once, I did this three different times.  I guess the first time didn't suck enough.  Good grief.  Now I'm looking at building a real-deal mash tun, one where I don't have to work and where I can get some re-circulation and good sparge.

 

Rather than use a conventional wort chiller, I made this jockey box(?) type of thing on a recommendation.  So basically 5 gallons of wort goes from 200F to around 60F in just a few minutes and all I have to do is open the valve on the kettle.

And below, I'm done bottling except for maybe small experimental beers.   Everything else goes in a keg.

Finally, I noticed the juniper trees where I live are full of ripe berries of the semi-edible sort.  I plan on filling a bag or freeze drying some to try do some old world gruit beer or many Finnish sahti later in the year.