Well, my 15-gallon (57-L) batch of pale ale is brewed, fermented and kegged. Everything went well, though I did worry a bit during the fermentation. I fermented the beer in a 20-gallon (76-L) garbage can. The lid closes, but doesn't seal tightly, so it was a quasi-open fermentation. The open part didn't bother me much, but not being able to see or hear an airlock bubble as a confirmation that fermentation had started was a little disquieting. I didn't want to open the lid to look until I was sure things had kicked off and there was a protective layer of kräusen.

I ended up not peeking at all until the fourth day. I figured that I had cooled and aerated the wort adequately, pitched the proper amount of yeast and kept the fermenter in a place where the ambient temperature should have been fine for an ale fermentation (even after the fermenting wort heated itself up a few degrees). So, everything should have gone well. And, when I peeked on day four, it was obvious that it did. There was still kräusen on top of the wort, but the fermentation had clearly just about run its course.

The next day, around noon, I decided to peek again and saw that the kräusen had fallen into the beer, leaving the top of the beer exposed to oxygen. I quickly grabbed the demi-john and racking cane (which I had already sanitized) and racked the beer to a closed secondary.

Once the beer was carbonated and ready to go, I was psyched — it was probably the best hoppy pale ale I've ever made. (I upped the amount of gypsum I brewed with this time and it gave me that great hop character I was looking for.) And, I had 15 gallons of it! I still may dry hop the beer, but it tastes fine as it is.

I also brewed a reiterated mash beer at Joe Walton's house. Joe, Jim Michalk and I brewed the beer and decided to name it Mongo, after the character in Blazing Saddles. The recipe was 100% Belgian Pilsner malt hopped with a mixture of high-alpha hops (Summit and Magnum). We did three mashes of 10 lbs. (4.5 kg) of grain each, then boiled the wort for 90 minutes. The wort was racked onto a yeast cake of Trappist ale yeast from a previous beer of Joe's. It's fermenting now.

I've got ingredients for yet another one of these, and a few ideas on how to shorten the brewday slightly and also improve the extract efficiency.

For the past couple weeks, I've been soaking some oak cubes in red wine (a Zinfandel I made from a kit awhile back). I've changed the wine a couple times because I'm tring to get most of the aggressive, new oak flavor out of them. In the next couple days, I am going to rack my Flanders Red to a carboy and add the cubes. I'll keg the beer after a week or two of contact time. I just want a hint of barrel in the beer, not to a Lümberbräu.

I still haven't racked my Vienna lager to keg yet. But it's sitting in my stainless conical and the yeast has been dumped, so it should be doing fine.

Finally, I need to add some kräusen beer to a couple of my big lagers one more time to get them down to a reasonable FG — this would be a great thing to do before the holidays, except I've already got some other brewing stuff planned.