Long Time No Taco

When we last left our hero, I was about to transfer my first batch of home-brew to a glass carboy for the first time! Did that go smoothly? Did tiny single-cell organisms perform the miracle of converting sugars into alcohol and carbonation? Does anyone get my PUN-ny blog titles?!? All that and more in this next installment of Long Time No Taco: I have been very busy in the kitchen, and a lot has happened! This is an Alot, by "The Oatmeal". Sadly, Alot has not happened. Transferring my peanut butter porter to the glass carboy for secondary fermentation went smoothly. I rarely get to use words like "smoothly" when describing home brewing; something unexpected always seems to crop up. such as 10 days later, when I went to bottle the beer, using my brand new bottle capper... Porter goes is... ...Porter comes out! After transferring the beer back to the ale pail with some maple syrup to help bottle condition (the yeast eats this new sugar source t...

More accurately: I Need to Start Using a Mash Tun.  Warning: The following contains more beer brewing jargon than the average person will care to learn. That said, you can replace most terms with "beer-thingy" in your head, and be just fine. I became passionate about home brewing after receiving a 1-gallon starter kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop  as a birthday present, a few years ago. This year, I finally made the jump to brewing 5-gallon batches. Left: One-gallon Black IPA, Right: Five-gallon brew-in-a-bag Galaxy hop IPA, Taken 8/23/15 Every home brewer has a different history and approach. My kit being for all-grain brewing, it wasn't until this year that I even saw what an extract looked like. Eventually, I would use both dry and liquid extracts to make a Rye Saison, and a clone of President Obama's White House Honey Porter, but it turns out, most home brewers enter the hobby exclusively using these extracts. Many never make all-grain batches, even after y...