Holy Crap am I Behind!

Wow. Have I ever been negligent. It's been 2 weeks since I've posted, and I still hadn't even covered the Toronto Trip. Lazy!

So here's how things went in Toronto. Tyler, here's your porn:

POW!

I like to call this one, "Get more bars in more places - AT&T"

Now, for other, non-Tyler porn pictures from the trip.

Here's the asshole of America, Buffalo, NY!

Back to better places.

Whew! All in all it was a legendary trip. Many memories were made, and I'm sure forgotten as soon as they happened!

Now onto the beer! The Schitze! Barleywine is now brewed and fermenting! Holy cow what a task. Here's the final recipe for The Schitze!

That's a ton of ingredients!

11 pounds of Dry Malt extract. 3 lbs were added at the beginning and 8 for a late extract addition for higher hop utilization.

2 pounds of Melanoiden Malt.

1 pound of Crystal 60L Malt.

1 pound of CaraMunich Malt.

1 pound of Dextrine.

8 oz of Hops.

Here's the hop schedule.

90 minutes: 2 oz of Cluster

30 minutes: .5 oz Cascade

20 minutes: .5 oz Cascade

15 minutes: .5 oz Cascade

10 minutes: .5 oz Cascade 1 oz Centennial

5 minutes: .5 oz Cascade

1 minute: .5 oz Cascade

The original gravity was around 1.100.

I've gotta say, I'm not a big fan of Dry Extract during the brewing process. I hadn't used it before yesterday, and I was not impressed. It clumps up and takes forever to dissolve into the water. That being said, I was brewing an extremely high gravity beer, and only using about 3.75 gallons of water to boil in, so it may have just reached its limit on how much extract it could hold. I'll try a few more lower-gravity brews with Dry extract before I give up on it.

Another addition I used yesterday was FermCaps. FermCaps is used to prevent boilovers in your boil, and blowoffs when you ferment. It worked great in the boil, and as far as I can tell it did its job in fermentation. However, this is what I came home to this afternoon.

There was actually beer coming out of the airlock. This is it cleaned up a bit. Since this was such a monster brew with a high gravity, and since I used a yeast starter, the Krausen almost caused a blowout. The high amount of activity in the fermenter also raised the temperature of the cooler I had it in. It fermented at about 70 degrees during the day today. About 5 degrees warmer than I wanted it to. However, I've got the temperature back down, so hopefully there won't be too many esters or perhaps off-flavors getting in there.

Tomorrow, if I have time, I'll try to post about the Canes' awesome success as of late.

Till then, Cheers eh!