Weekend Update

(Cue SNL's Weekend Update music)



So another busy weekend passes us by. Plenty to tell.



First, the Canes seem to be on a roll lately. At least a roll of beating crappier teams than themselves. They've now beaten the Isles, Lightning, and the Avalanche for further muddle the Eastern Conference Playoff race.

Next, the American Amber is finished and ready to drink! So I drank it! It's really not bad. Since it was my first recipe of jut throwing something together, I wasn't thinking it was going to be all that good. First of all, it's really light. In taste that is. I didn't really add enough malt to the brew when I first started with it, so it's kinda weak (maxed at about 3.5% ABV) and I probably could've added more hops to it as well. But since it was my first brew, I really had no where to start. I now know that if I have 28 IBU's (the higher the number the more bitter the beer, and 28 is not high). I think it was calculated out to have only 120 calories or so in each brew. That's what you can call a lite beer! So this can be my Bud Lite of my homebrews. You can pound these and never feel a bit of the alcohol, but it tastes a hell of a lot better than Bud.

I also bought Beersmith this weekend. It is awesome! You can create all of your own brews in this program. It's got pretty much any kind of ingredient you could possibly want. It calculates the expected color, ABV, bitterness, calories, original and final gravities, and a ton of other useful tools. You can send your water off to get tested by your city, plug in the numbers that you receive from them, and it will tell you how to adjust your brew accordingly to make better beer, based on your water. It has about 400 different beer profiles that you can match up to your recipe, so that you know that you are making the correct "style" of beer. It's an awesome tool. I've spent hours on it just messing around with recipes.


Finally, I bottled Tyler's Bachelor Party Pale Ale this weekend. It actually looks identical to the Amber, so thankfully I had some different color bottle caps for it. Hope you like Carolina Blue, Tyler. They didn't have Maple Leaf Blue. With the emptying of the Secondary Fermenter came the refilling of it with my Irish Red. It looks so awesome! You can really see the red coloring in it. It does look as though it may come out a little lighter in color when it's in a pint glass, but we'll wait and see. It's promising to be a very clear beer I believe.