Home Brewing Adeventures, pt 1

This Saturday I brewed up a batch of Nut Brown Ale. This is the most alcoholic beer available to home brewers. Due to a happy accident, it appears that my brew will be even more boozey than that.

Basically, you are supposed to start with one and a half gallons of water in your wort pot. For some reason, I thought 8 cups made a gallon (rather than the actual 16 cups). I corrected the error later in the carboy by adding more water. The initial specific gravity readings for this ale was supposed to be between 1.049 - 1.051. My reading, temperature corrected, came out to 1.055.

This error will more than likely translate into even more alcohol in this batch. Oh, darn. A pal of mine who is a master home brewer told me that the way I corrected this error was just fine and that he was currently brewing a batch of Nut Brown that looked just the same in the carboy.

So that makes me feel like a pretty smart guy. This is only my third batch. Even though I made an error I was able to correct the error midstream, thinking on my feet. I'm quite proud of myself. Below you can see the fermentation trap bubbling away with the byproducts of yeast makin' booze.