The Sun Never Sets Brewing Company

Moved out here almost two months and it took a while to get setup to brew. Certain equipment had to be found, purchased, constructed, or otherwise situated, and I had to get a day to myself. I was finally able to set aside a few hours last Monday (8/22/2011), and brewed up a batch of pale ale, or what we like to call Gabe’s Basement Brew. Came in at just under 5 gallons, which was perfect as this is my first beer fermented in a corny keg, and close to the OG target at 1.050. This is also the first no-chill batch, so some modifications were made to the hopping schedule, and it will also be dry hopped.

Fermentation under pressure in the corny with the spunding valve has been (apparently) going quite well. If the gravity sample in a few days is to my liking, bumping up the temperature a few degrees to finish off fermentation, followed by a cold crash and then transferring to a serving keg under counter-pressure. Only question is when exactly to add the dry hops.

We’ve been talking about over a month about how we needed to get together and take care of a number of non-brewing tasks. We bottled what was left in the kegs of our 2010 Christmas Ale (less than a case) and John Palmer’s Oktoberfest (a bit over a case), and finally got our Pub Ale and the Centennial Blonde Cream Ale out of fermenters and into kegs, and on gas.

Interesting bottling day, more on that to follow.

We also de-labeled and cleaned a batch of bottles, and generally cleaned things up a bit. Finally, I got started on “installing” the Little Giant pump and a counterflow chiller in one of our old bottling buckets, to help properly create a Countertop Brutus. Was going to convert the current CFC, but ultimately decided to make use of the leftover hose and copper tubing from the first one.