Stygian

At long last, the time has come. Both the Munich Dark Lager and the Red Ale are finally ready to drink. Both turned out better than expected. The Cascade hops I added really gave the beers nice floral-citrus notes, just as I remembered from my previous batches a long time ago. While I almost always forgo testing alcohol %'s, I have to say they are pretty strong. I get a good buzz off 1L, which is about 3 cans worth. Overall I'm very impressed with the result!

I'm particularly happy about my newfound sterilizing agent, Star San. It made sterilizing the bottles a breeze. The chemical kills bacteria by lowering the pH of any surface it touches to about 2ish. I batched up 5 gal worth of cleaning solution, particularly since I needed to clean my primary fermenter pail in order to add priming sugar to my beers, and then I proceeded to dunk all of my bottles into the fermenter filled with the solution. Since this is a no rinse chem cleaner, all I had to do was dump the water back into the pail and put new bottles in. I think I managed to knock out 48 bottles in about an hour and a half. That's far better than what I needed for my old stuff. Additionally, the old stuff needed rinsing, so that was extra time and money (water) down the drain.

Now with those done, I'll start my cider. I managed to grab a giant bag of sugar (10kg) from Costco, so I'll likely batch up some Hobo Wine. It should keep me busy for a while. I still need to rack off my wine, so I anticipate a productive weekend.

Honestly not much going on. It's been raining a lot, pretty unusual for Calgary, but I don't mind. As long as the water refrains from taking on it's solid form, I am more than happy to enjoy all the free water my lawn is getting. I've got a dying pine tree on my front lawn that seems to be trying to come back to life. I'm rooting for it (pun intended) since it prolongs my decision to cut it down before the city flags it lol.

Anywhoo, time to go home and enjoy a cold one, cheers!