Craft Beer Calculator

As I mentioned before, usually when people send me a request to share some sort of link via my Contact Me form, I am pretty accommodating. Apparently, sometime last week someone tried to contact me using that form. Either the email server from my hosting company did not work quite right or (unfortunately more likely), I deleted the email thinking it was a server status email. Unfortunately, the "Contact Me" email and the server status emails look very similar.

Anyway. This person did not give up. He cleverly went to the SheppyBrew Facebook Page and messaged me.

He wants me to help him "take a stance against drunk driving" and share a resource on my blog:

www.CraftBeerCalculator.com

Gruntled Berry Weiße

I brewed Sunday.

I decided that Super Bowl Sunday's batch would be a 2.4 gallon batch instead of my usual 5.5 gallon batch size. Being the lazy guy that I am, I thought I would use the base of a recipe I'd already designed and brewed: Gruntled Sour Weiße.

Just to make it a little different, I decided to make it a fruit beer, simply adding the same frozen mixed berries that I've been using to help flavor some of my yogurt. I do plan on not adding quite as much Lactic Acid as well.

The resulting recipe on SheppyBrew.com is Gruntled Berry Weiße.

Not only was this a small batch, but it is also very low in alcohol, thus low in OG, thus low in grains needed to brew it.

XLV

My parents will tell you that they are not old enough to have a child who is 45 years of age. Or at least, my dad has mentioned similar things about my age for just about as long as I remember.

They did have me young.

Did you know 45 is dividable by 1, 3, 5, 9, 15, and 45?

My wife looks way too young to be married to a 45 year old guy. Unless the guy is a hell of a lot more wealthy than I am. 

More Yogurt

Well, you may remember that a couple of weeks ago I made homemade yogurt. using a recipe from my sister's blog. See Creamy Homemade Greek Yogurt for her recipe. My blog entry is called Making the Bluefield Yogurt. If you missed it, you should go read it right now. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Frozen Mixed Berries

I really enjoyed that first batch. I liked to fill a pint mason jar half with frozen berries, fill the rest with yogurt, store in the fridge so that I could take it to eat for breakfast at work. Yummy. Of course, the berries would thaw and the fruit and yogurt would blend some. It was nice.

Sledding

We went sledding during the day on New Year's Eve this year. There is a Jefferson County Open Space Park called Meyer Ranch. We've seen people sledding there, but never tried it ourselves. This time, we decided to head down 285 to try out this hill.

Not sure why it took me so long to share these photos and videos, but here they are ....

Making the Bluefield Yogurt

If you follow the SheppyBrew Facebook page or my twitter feed, you likely know that I made Greek yogurt this weekend.

I was inspired by my sister, Mrs. Bluefield, and her blog post Creamy Homemade Greek Yogurt.

Actually, she also blogged about homemade yogurt back in August, at which point I decided I needed to give it a try. I'm not sure why it took me so long. If you followed the link to her posts (which you totally should), you probably know that the process is ridiculously easy. It is time consuming, but all but about 15 minutes is waiting for the magic to happen.

Seriously simple. Heat the milk. Cool the milk. Inoculate the milk. Wait. Those are the steps. If you want Greek yogurt, you need to strain off some whey.

Snowball's Brew Day

In 2013, when I did my little SheppyBrew Styles project, my Category 1 Light Lager beer was Snowball's Chance (in) Helles. The beer was a disappointment mostly because I bottled it and the carbonation was very inconsistent. Some bottles were practically flat and some were way too carbonated. I tried to fix some of the bottles by adding more priming sugars and that just made things worse.

The beers that were close to the right carbonation level were pretty good. I did enter this beer into a competition, and it did fairly well on its scoring, but I never felt I enjoyed the beer as much as I thought I should.

Obviously, I knew that I would have to brew this recipe again so that I could find out how it would be when properly carbonated. I thought I would have gotten to this re-brew quite awhile ago. I never did....

.... until this past weekend.

Missing Taco Pterodactyl?

I'm afraid my travel bug, Taco Pterodactyl has gone missing.

Taco is my second oldest travel bug, and until recently, the oldest one still surviving.

For quite awhile he was traveling across Florida with one geo-cacher. On December 31th, this geo-cacher said "good-bye" to my little Taco Pterodactyl and dropped him off at "Want a Steak, Want a Shake, or will you get Gas?".

On January 5, a log on this cache says, "Nice cache no trackable inside tho".

Assuming that the January 5th log is correct, and that cacher did not just miss Taco Pterodactyl in there, either someone picked him up and forgot to log him, or someone picked him up and didn't know to log him, or someone stole him.

Of course, I am hoping that someone just forgot to log him. Perhaps by the time you read this, it will have been logged.

SheppyBrew X-Mas vs Breckenridge Christmas

I've mentioned a couple of times that I think the 2014 version of my X-Mas Ale was based originally on a clone recipe I found (years ago) for Breckenridge Brewery's Christmas Ale. I don't know where the recipe would have come from, and it may be that I imagined this memory. Of course, even if it started as a clone, I would have made significant changes to it. That is just the way I do things. I never copy recipes completely.

Even so, I knew that I would be trying a side-by-side tasting of the two beers, just to see how they compared. I've done it a few times this year, and if you follow the SheppyBrew Facebook page, you may have seen pictures.

Until today, though, I have not gotten around to blogging about the comparison. Here we go ....

They are certainly not the same. They are both winter warmers, but I don't think anyone who tried them both would confuse the two.

2014 Year-End SheppyBrew Stats

2014 has ended. SheppyBrew Brewery was pretty busy last year, although not quite as busy as the past couple of years. Since the Brewery likes to post quarterly updates on how much we have brewed, it is time for another Brew Stats post.

If you are interested, can see all these past updates (including the one you are reading right now ... and if any I do in the future) by following this link: http://blog.ericshepard.com/search/label/Brew%20Stats .

Unlike the past couple of years, I did not break the 100 gallon mark for beer brewed in 2014.  This doesn't come as a surprise to you if you've been following my quarterly reports this year. I did get to approximately 90 gallons of beer for the year, though. After the second quarter, I didn't think I would get anywhere close to 90, so things really sped up in the second half of the year.

First Brew of 2015: Arctic Vortex

The lovely and sexy SheppyBrew Beer Model purchased me a refractometer for Christmas this year. I've always thought that it would be nice to own refractometer, but it is not something I ever felt I would buy for myself. I've always been able to brew without one, after all.

However, getting one was very exciting for me. The nice thing about a refractometer is being able to take gravity readings with a tiny amount of wort, which means much less time cooling the sample down. This means a much quicker pre-boil gravity reading. It also makes it much more practical to take readings throughout the boil. This flexibility allows adjustments during the boil to make sure that the beer follows the plan.

Of course getting this meant that I had to brew to try out my new toy.

Still More @Untappd Badges 18.5

I sort of left you hanging on Still More @Untappd Badges 18. One day, I was drinking beer in my new local brewery, when all of a sudden, I had two badges jump to level 50! Apparently, untappd changed its maximum level on all badges from 10 to 50.

As you may be able to imagine, this allowed me to get quite a few "new" badges that were not really new. They were just higher levels.

One Hundred

If you ever go to the SheppyBrew website to look at my beer recipes, you may have noticed that most of the urls to the recipe pages have a numerical id associated with each of them.

For example, recipe.aspx?id=1 is Eric's Red Ale. Similarly, recipe.aspx?id=2 is Buckwheat's Belgium Pale Ale. So it goes. My 50th recipe page is Pompously Illegitimate Red Ale. My 75th is Helles in a Hand Bock-sket. This is because the website is mostly filled with a simplistic content management system that stores most of its recipe pages in a SQL Server Database table. The primary key on that table is an identity field which increments itself by 1 every time a new page is added.

Premium Geocaching

Exciting news!

I am now a Premium Member on Geocaching.com !

If you follow this blog, you've seen some of my posts about my family's GeoCaching adventures.  To me it is a wonderfully fun hobby. If you don't know what geocaching is, check out Geocaching 101. 

One of the really cool things about the hobby is that you can do it practically for free. You need some sort of hand-held GPS or a smartphone on which to load an app, but other than that, all you need to do is go to the website, sign up for a free account, and start doing your thing.

I think it is an awesome way to add adventure to family hikes. This is especially true if you have kids, but from time to time I will do some searching without the kids.

Still More @Untappd Badges 18

From time to time, I share the untappd badges that I've earned. I can't imagine why you would want to, but you can look at all the posts (including this one) by going to the "untappd" label on this blog.

Here are some of the badges I've "earned" since Still More @Untappd Badges 17 .

Snowshoeing

My kids had all of Thanksgiving week off from school. I also took it off from work. On Wednesday, my wife suggested, "Let's go snowshoeing".

When my wife says something like "Let's go snowshoeing" or "Let's go hiking" or "Let's go for a bike ride", she never has an answer when I ask "where". It is one of the things I find amusing about her.

The "usual" place we go snowshoeing, and anyplace relatively close to our house doesn't really have enough snow in November to justify snowshoeing.

This means it was up to me to come up with the "where".

We ended up going just West of Nederland, Colorado into the Indian Peaks wilderness. We could not drive very far up the forest access road, so we ended up hiking up the road itself.

My Thanksgiving Beer Lineup

Merry Thanksgiving everybody!

Thanksgiving is obviously a big food holiday. For me, it is also a beer holiday. As you may or may not know, beer is a far superior drink with which to pair food than any other alcoholic beverage. Over the course of the day, I am likely to try a few.

In addition to various SheppyBrew beers I have on tap, I also have bottled beers that I'm likely to drink today.

Brewing T.Ra.Sh. Mexican Lager

I brewed my T.Ra.Sh. Mexican Lager today.

To be completely honest, there is nothing particularly "Mexican" about this beer. It does use WLP940, which is White Labs "Mexican Lager Yeast". Its SheppyBrew Label features my father-in-law, and he is of Mexican decent.

But really, when I picture a Mexican Lager, this isn't what I think of.

Stylistically, it is sort of a Vienna Lager, which some of those famous mass produced darker lagers are. It isn't really dark enough, though. It isn't sweet enough either.

It certainly isn't light in color or body to be one of those lighter mass-produced Mexican lagers either. It has too much nobel hop character as well.

Bottling and Kegging Coffee Stout

When I brewed Gnaughty Gnome English Coffee Stout a couple weeks ago, I had wort left over after I filled my big fermenter. It was pretty trub-filled, but I put about a gallon and a half in one of my Mr. Beer fermenters.

Yesterday, I bottled up that "extra" beer before I kegged the "main" batch. I've mentioned before that I dislike bottling (actually I probably used the word "hate"). I never really minded bottling back when I was doing Mr. Beer sized batches. During each bottling session, by the time I was getting sick of the process, the small batch was done.

And this bottling session was even better. I only got a couple of liter bottles, 4 bombers, and 5 12oz bottles. Filling 11 vessels is not bad at all.

The FG was 1.015 on the bottled beers. The sample tasted nice. It was not particularly "coffee-like", but that is OK. I will enjoy drinking these when they are carbonated.

Chihuly

The Denver Botanical Gardens has been hosting a Chihuly Exhibit. Yesterday, the Sheppy Family headed over there to check it out. It was really cool. There are night-time showings, which would probably be even more awesome, but those are sold out.

So, these daytime pictures will have to do us.