Friday Beer Blogging

I've been brewing again, getting ready for the wedding (The Talented Videographer suggested I make the beer). Yea, and little did she recognize the Beast when she saw it. I spent the next few weeks upgrading all of my equipment: built a mash tun, a 7-gallon boil system, a stir plate for culturing yeast starters, and a fermentation chiller that runs off a thermostat with a Peltier cooler that heats & cools, keeping my fermenting beer at a fixed temperature (the plans are here). Overkill? No such sauce.

Now I'm starting to brew experiments for the wedding beers. I'm figuring bride and groom signature drafts. For M, I've started a batch of raspberry wheat (Megaberry Wheat) and a Shiner "Cheer" clone -- a Maibock that's mashed with roasted pecans and lightly flavored with peaches (Yellow Rose). Next week I start the guy brews -- a sharp rye beer (Slacker in the Rye), and perhaps a Belgian Wit (Pithy Wit) or a doppelbock.

Anyway, here are some of the labels. I'd show you pics of the setup, but the documentarian has been too busy trying to save journalism (and I conveniently forgot how to take "photographs" when we moved in together.)