Brown bottling day!

First, a raspberry amber update. The original brix reading was 10.8%. The reading we took today was 4.6%. This gives us a final ABV of 5.3% (using http://onebeer.net/refractometer.shtml).

Three weeks in the bottle is definitely what was needed to make the raspberry PERFECT! The carbonation is spot on, the head retention is fantastic, the taste and color are both AMAZING!

Now, on to the brown!

The brix is currently 6.9%. We plan on having the brown sit for a couple weeks till we taste, but we are saving the majority of this batch for our first tasting party. We will be starting another raspberry batch next week and once that is ready we will schedule the party. If you would like to come please let us know! We are also still looking for logo designs and name suggestions for our beers. Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments or email us at hazelday81@gmail.com.

Brown transfer day!

Today we are transferring our brown to the secondary fermentation. Our final brix reading is 7.0%, which gives us an ABV of 5.2% (calculated with the help of http://onebeer.net/refractometer.shtml).

In other news, we are going to try washing our own yeast to use in the future, hopefully to cut down on costs a bit. We're going to try the procedure outlined at http://hbd.org/carboy/yeast_washing.htm.

Additionally, the raspberry amber is officially the most beautiful beer on the planet. We'll try to get some good photos up of it soon. The taste is fantastic as well. I'm just a little blown away by how gorgeous it is. We'll be having a small BBQ for our friends and family very soon to help us with the drinking of this beer. This won't be our official tasting party though. There are a few tweaks we want to make to the amber before we have our fancy pants tasting party.

Mead update: brix is 6.4%, and the pH is 3.0. We are going to add some calcium carbonate to raise the pH, we'd like it to ideally be around 3.8.

Till next time! ~erin and patrick~