joshbrews.com
Linux and Beer Brews

It’s been a while since I updated. the second PBB Ale turned out.. well ok. It tastes a little yeasty and is over carbonated. I will probably not try to harvest and reuse yeast from a previous batch unless there is a world wide yeast shortage. I think I would have gotten a better result if I had just used dried Nottingham yeast. I may try this recipe again after a while, but for now I am planning on making a Porter next.

The Cyser is ready to bottle. I have purchased some Ikea flip top 1k glass bottles and some rubber stoppers for the bottling. I Just need to find the time to do the bottling. The Cyser tastes very nice. It has a slight apple nose, with an even more subtle sulfur note. The sulfur note has faded somewhat over the last couple of months. The flavor is spicy with a slight apple flavor, fading to sweet and warm. The spiciness and warmth have faded over the last couple of months and should continue to mellow. The SG was 0.0992@81F which is lower than the reading I took in march. I have seen no airlock activity in the last month and do not expect the SG to go lower.

I planted some hops back at the end of march. You can see some pictures here on Flickr. I planted 2 Chinook and 2 Nugget rhizomes on 03/28 and 2 Liberty Rhizomes on 04/27. All 6 plants are doing well, and have all started flowering. I don’t know how if I will get any usable hops from the nugget and liberty, because I dosed them all little too heavily with Epsom salts and stunted their growth for about a month(Was trying to fix an unknown nutrient deficiency). At the time this occurred the Chinook already had sizable hop flowers and have since formed into some nice cones. I have been watering the hops by hand every couple of days, giving them about a half gallon per plant. Sometimes I have water twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening on the hotter days(95+F). We have not had very much rainfall over the last 3 month. We have averaged around 2 inches a month since February.