The Dark Side of The Arts

A while ago I posted about my ventures back into the arts. My own chronicle or sorts. Basically I set up the fermentation of two cans of goop. You can refresh your memories by reading about it here. Anyhow since then the wort has played host to fornicating microorganisms which eat sugar and piss out ethanol. Then the 'green' unconditioned beer was racked of the primary yeast cake into a cube for cold conditioning. I should note that I added a packet of SAFlager 34/70 for microbiological reasons. This brought the gravity down ever so slightly and cleaned up the small amount of esters that had been produced in primary fermentation. It also added a little bit of diacetyl to round out the flavour profile. After two weeks of cold conditioning I decided that I would be packaging this beer by polypin and serving through one of my beer engines on Xmas eve. To give it a unique hop character I added 150g of whole hop flowers which I grew in my hop garden. They are Columbus hops, but tend to have more of an EKG taste to them. Hop flavour is not only varietal but environmental and as such flavours are influenced by the soil, light and other conditions weigh in on flavour - hence these hops have a marmalade flavour similar to EKG rather than a harsh pine like flavour of US grown Columbus. Anyhow I forgot about the beer at that stage and left it for a few weeks. On Wednesday evening I poured off a few schooners of this wonderful dark ruby red beer and it's the shit. I plan to transfer to a polypin tomorrow although I can't guarantee that there will be much left on Xmas eve!
I am also slowly rebuilding my all grain system. I have a new millmaster grain mill which I will post about next week and I have ordered 2kg of hops from a grower in China and 40kg of malt from Joe White malting's. Bring on a new batch in a couple of weeks when the consumables turn up.
Tonight I am off to the Nag's Head hotel for a few pints of cask conditioned Braidwood ESB. Life is good (well until I start house hunting again tomorrow!).