New Equipment

I picked up a few new items this month to enhance the work I've been doing.

I visited morebeer.com mainly because they have decent prices and free-shipping on most items.  I picked up the following:

Beer Bottling Tree
Sanitizer Injector
4 oz. Star-San No-Rinse
Wort Chiller with tubing

I also visited the local home brew store: beerbrew.com.

I picked up a new Hydrometer (I broke our old one when washing.)

I also picked up the ingredients to brew my Pale Ale, (which I'm making some modifications to and doing some experimentation with different yeasts), ingredients to brew my Hefeweizen (which I'm also tweaking a bit), and 2 3.5 gal. Better Bottle fermenters.


I mainly wanted to pick up the 2 fermenters so I can split up 5 gallon batch of beer and try different yeast strains.  This will allow me to hone in on exactly what I'm trying to produce much quicker and, still be producing the same volume of beer.

I also brewed my new Hefeweizen recipe and had a chance to try out the wort chiller.  It worked great.  15 minutes of running cold water through it brought it down from 200 F to 78 F.

More details on the Hefeweizen brew to come.

Review of my Maple Wheat and Pumpkin Ale

The Maple Wheat took roughly a month to bottle age properly.  Note, I did not add a second dose of yeast prior to bottling, which probably would have helped me here.  Nonetheless, I have beer now and it took a little longer to complete.  

The Maple Wheat beer, which I've dubbed as Maple Madness has a nice Amber brown color to it and is reminiscent of a Hefeweizen.  It is technically of the style weizenbock.  One thing to note is that it is a much stronger beer than a Hefeweizen, and the recipe estimated it would be around an 8% ABV beer.  My final calculation determined it came out to 6.83% ABV, but I suspect it to be possibly a bit higher and in the 7.0-8.0 ABV range.  It is a smooth easy to drink beer, especially if you're a Hefeweizen fan.  It has hints of Maple in the aftertaste, hints of clove in the nose, and holds a good foamy white head.  After two of these guys I'm in a pretty good mood, so be careful.  I would brew this again, but maybe make some of my own modifications to further enhance the recipe.

The Pumpkin Ale I tried came out pretty well also.  It did not have as much Pumpkin Pie spice flavor as I had hoped, so I'll add more next time.  It finished conditioning about 1 1/2 weeks after bottling.

It has a nice dark orange color to it, and a reasonable head.  It is a typical Pumpkin Ale, and is not the best, but not at all a bad beer to sit down and relax with at Thanksgiving.  I plan on bringing a few of these with me November 24 to enjoy with dinner.  It has a nice subtle Pumpkin flavor to it, and is not at all over hopped (just right in my opinion.)  The beer came in with a 5.25% ABV which is right about what I was expecting.  I will try a few different things the next time I brew this one.