Pale Ale Goes into the Keg

Well I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday evening than kegging a Dailey Brewing Company Pale Ale! It's our first of this style and its measuring 5.88% alcohol by volume and 43.5 IBUs (this measures the hoppiness). We snuck a few samples as we were transferring it and it tastes wonderful! I think Jason will really be happy with this one. Here are some pictures of the process:

Jason siphoning the beer from secondary fermentation straight into the keg.




















Here, Jason is hooking up the carbonation hoses and blasting CO2 into the keg to blow out all of the air and replacing it with CO2. This will give the beer a nice foamy head!















And here is our first keg, full of yummy beer, sitting in its new home! We'll be able to taste it in about 3 days. My mouth is watering already...




















We bought some ingredients today to make our first Hefeweizen so we'll be brewing that tomorrow. I hope to do the bulk of this one and get my hands dirty so I can learn the process better. Can't think of a better teacher...

Pale Ale Goes Into Secondary Fermentation

Here are some shots of Jason transferring our Pale Ale into secondary fermentation. It sat in primary for almost 6 days and it will sit in secondary for about 10 days, then we'll transfer it into the keg and tap it in our new kegerator! Can't wait to try it out...it smells of yummy beerness.

It's much easier to siphon if it sits up super high like this.



Carboy's almost full!



Jason wraps the carboy with a dark fleece jacket to keep any light out.



The water in the plug on top should start bubbling soon - that means the yeast is "doing its thing". Although it won't be as active as it was during primary fermentation.

New Tapping System

Well this weekend turned out much more exciting than we had anticipated! After realizing that a kegerator that had been available on Craigs List (from someone here in Castle Rock, no less), was already sold, Jason decided to keep looking. Over a few pints at Dry Dock on Saturday he found a fridge with four tappers already installed, available with a 20 gallon CO2 tank that was just posted on Friday (the seller also living in Castle Rock). So he went to check it out first thing this morning, and, well, here it is! We decided after some discussion that it would be better to keep it in the basement and are extra excited that there's an available outlet near the washer & dryer. So we don't even need to have another outlet installed. Woo hoo!

So we brewed an American Pale Ale today and are very excited to get it into the new keg I bought Jason for his birthday. Should be ready to share at the next Rockhoppers meeting in February. I've got a hankering for a Heffeweisen next...yum!