Our new basement brewery

Aaron and I spent last evening cleaning, organizing, and arranging our new setup.  Things are looking good and we are both excited to use all of the new equipment. We now have a five gallon stainless steel conical fermenter and a very nice grain mill.

My Father gave us this great little glass front refridgerator that he no longer uses. It should work great for lagering and storing hops and yeast.

We also stopped at the Niagara Traditon Home Brew store picked up some various grains, hops, and yeast. I also Picked up a new book called The Homebrewers Garden. I'm excited to read this one.

I have big plans for the garden this year. I plan on growing veggies and having a seperate hop yard. I would like to grow Willamette, Nugget, and Cascade hops. I started a compost pile late last september. Hopefuly by jump starting it last fall I will have enough compost for both beds by spring. This will be the first time at attempting to grow hops.

We are both looking forward to using our own home grown ingredients and develpoing our own all grain recipes. This should prove to be a very challenging experiance with some ups and downs. Neither of us have experiance brewing all grain recipes so we've been reading up and honing our skills with extract brews.

Which brings me to the Barley wine. We've kept the temperature right around 68 degrees. We have a heating belt around the bucket and it is placed near both the hot water tank and the furnace. The O.G. was 1.079. It has been in primary fermentation for 16 days. The air lock stopped bubbling about 10 days in but the gravity was still way too high. Monday we tried aireting it and that did not work. Last night we added some high alcohol tolerant champagne yeast hopping that it would start fermenting again and lower the gravity. This morning I checked it at seven a.m. and it was not fermenting. Our only idea now is to transfer it to a carboy for secondary fermentation and hop that the gravity falls then.

Looking forward to getting things rolling full steam. Any and all feedback is welcome. This is a learning process for us that we wanted to share with like minded individuals.

In Primary : Barley wine

On the agenda : Sunday, February 7th - Stout brew. (Yes, I'm aware it's the big game that day.)