sure wish cupcake would send me a blood orange hef recipe so we could brew again...we're really slacking...one brew session in 2 months...sad...

we brewed up an oatmeal stout this afternoon. mashed at 154.9. finally got a chance to try out the fermenator. we couldn't get the ventur pump to work after an hour of testing and messing around with it so the therminator was unusable. we probably could have gravity fed it, but i suppose i had one too many to think of that when put on the spot. we ended up setting the kettle at the top of the stairs and running a hose just long enough to drop the chilled wort down and into the top of the fermenator, which worked way better than trying to carry the full fermenator down the stairs. once the chilled wort sat for about 15 mins we opened the bottom dump valve and collected about a quart worth of cold break. took an original gravity of 1.055, then pumped some pure oxygen and hooked up the blow-off.















update: 02.20.11
woke up this morning to a beautiful site. the oatmeal stout is currently fermenting spot on at 68 and the 3/8" blow-off is working like a champ.





-bake

brewed up my dads imperial stout today. hit an og of 1.088. we also tested out a bazooka screen underneath the false bottom which worked out pretty good once we realized the false bottom had to be placed in upside-down.

-bake

decided to give the keezer a little freshin' up today. ran some blc through the lines and chalked the top. i still have about a gallon of fang maker left, but i'm pretty sure we can knock it out during this weekends session. we're going to brew up an imperial stout with my dad, so we should have plenty of beer drinking help on hand... something that is hard to find these days.



oh yea, notice the 20 dead kegs. thats 100 gallons of beer down the hatch. couldn't have done it without the amazing beer drinking powers that kris possesses.

-bake