Beer Diary...

A word of warning: Use extreme caution when handling your laptop after consuming alcohol even if it's just home brewed beer. I've just spent the last couple of weeks and a few hundred dollars trying to replace a damaged hard drive and recover and reload all of my files. I've always thought of myself as more agile when drunk but this incident has proven that I can be very awkward and inept. At this point I would say that I have 99% of the information back on the new hard drive but the 1% that is missing is important. I was using a book publisher called Blurb to create a practical pictorial of the malt extract and all-grain brewing processes. I spent uncounted time and effort to produce what I thought was a pretty good book. Now, it's all gone. But, being a homebrewer is all about tenacity and perseverance, so I start again with nothing but a renewed determination brought on by a tall cool glass of homebrewed IPA. I've still got all of the photo's that I used an...

In this video, I show how you can easily make a 'mock' version of a counter pressure bottle filler. The catch here is that you will not be injecting or pressurizing the bottle with co2 but instead creating pressure within the bottle by stopping the top and filling the bottle slowly with beer, releasing the pressure caused by the volume of beer flowing into the bottle. I hope this is helpful and if you have improvements on this idea, let us know. I know this idea is not new but I think it is important that the the key elements are considered when using this technique. Keep the cobra head open until you are ready to remove the wand. Close the cobra head before removing the wand from the bottle. Have at least ten feet of 3/16 hose in line to prevent 'out gassing'. Chill the bottles to be filled. Cap immediately after filling. With these precautions you should be able to fill bottles from the keg without losing any of the carbonation from solution. Cheers!

It's been a rough couple of weeks getting moved into a new place. We're now in Capitola, just a short drive up highway 1 from Aptos. A condo. It's going to be a challenge to see how I can brew here because of the limited space. There is a small concrete patio in the back with water spigot and electricity but it looks like I'll have to run a my cooling water discharge hose from the patio, through the living room and out to the kitchen sink. I don't want to run it on the ground because I suspect that others in this manicured complex may not like forty or fifty gallons of water running from under my fence and down through the parking lot. In the mean time, I have rented a small storage unit a few miles away that I will use primarily for fermenting my beer. This unit has electricity but no water. My main challenge is transporting full fermenters from home (where I'll brew) to the storage unit where it will ferment. I may fill several small buckets for hauling and th...