Winding down the day

It's now 6:30pm, just past the 12 hour mark of our day.

Skot is bleeding, and I (Alec) have sustained hot wort burns on both arms, making it a brew day like any other.

It's been a few days (weeks?), since the last post, so an update is due to our surprisingly numerous readers.

A the moment there's a batch of the Baltic Porter cooling in our travesty of a wort chiller. Yesterday's Baltic is about to meet its yeast.

Two early experimental batches, including our Sinister Twin Ale, are racked in anticipation of playing around with our keg filler next week. They'll be held at the brewery for in-house reference.

A number of other batches are mid-process, waiting for...

The 12 barrels of the Golden State Ale in our brite tank. The beer's delicious, but there's still no carbonation. A recently purchased chiller (used), sold in "excellent condition", arrived in what did indeed appear to be excellent condition... until we took the cover off. A warranty claim is in process, because the common definition of "excellent condition" does not include "stripped for useful parts".

No chilling unit means no effectively force-carbonated beer, so we're moving up the schedule for something a little more interesting. Our disposable kegs, Keykegs from Lightweight Containers in the Netherlands, give us the freedom to keg-condition our beers.

We'll be the first brewery in the United States using these kegs, and we're very excited about the prospect. More information about the Keykegs, and why we think that they're one of the greatest recent innovations in brewing, to come in a future post.

So faced with a choice between having a chiller up and running sometime in the near future, or kegs of the Golden State Ale available in two weeks, we've chosen the path that offers us a predictable delivery date for our first beer to market.

Mark your calendars for two weeks from Tuesday.