Brewing Diary

We're making progress. It's been a bit of a stressful week: two words: Cash Flow. Yawn. But things are looking up! It's all about brewing more beer, so it's all good stuff.

Yesterday Dann brewed Baby Tree, a seasonal quadrupel with dried plums (added in the brewhouse). He's very excited about it: as you can see from the photo, the wort looks pretty dark, which is exactly where we wanted it. Starting gravity is 20.6 Plato. We're using one Belgian yeast strain: our first single strain fermentation so far.

As with Jack D'Or and Saint Botolph's, we're fermenting this one in Paper City's long rectangular open fermenters. We're using it to our best benefit at that, fermenting up to 77 degrees.

Baby Tree has a bit of a story behind it, which we'll publish on the "beers" page closer to its release. It'll be out in time for Spring and Easter.

Jack D'Or 2 is in the bottle! Thank heavens. We're shipping out the kegs as we speak so hopefully you'll start seeing it in a bar near you soon. We've got a long day's labeling ahead of us tomorrow. 8 hours of hard labour, then it's straight to the diner for lots of French-Canadian food!

Well, we're not quite into bottle with Jack D'Or 2 yet. We decided to postpone bottling by a week and dry-hop it some more. We're waiting on kegs getting back to the brewery so we can get it out to some bars. I guess we need more kegs... We've been feeling like we're beginning to lose the hops from the first batch, so to keep them there longer in the bottle, we're adding some more now.

We're ordering the raw materials for our next beer, which will be out in time for Easter (and hopefully Spring!). It's going to be an interesting beer. We'll keep you posted. Next after that will be more St. Botolph's Town; after that, who knows?

On Thursday of this week we went out to Paper City Brewery, in Holyoke, MA, where we have one beer fermenting (Jack D'Or: batch 2) and one beer in bottles, ready to label. We spent a long day labeling St. Botolph's Town (by hand): about 1400 bottles. What a dreamy time!

We keep having issues with our labels: for the first batch of Jack D'Or they came spooled in the wrong direction, so the machine couldn't run them. This time, they came on a roll so big we could have used it as a spare tire. So the machine couldn't turn it. Anyway, we ended up doing it by hand. How rustic of us!

Hopefully by now you've noticed our new neck label (found on Saint Botolph's Town), complete with batch number and "bottled on" month. While it blatantly improves the overall look of the bottle - we have no way to mechanize its application. So labeling days won't get any shorter. About 14 working hours to do a batch as it stands.

The same day, we were ready to taste Jack D'Or batch two (post-fermentation), and add the nugget dry hops and champagne yeast. We love this yeast because it finishes the beer perfectly. It's always a nerve-wracking moment when you sample a beer from the tank: we have most of our money at any one time sitting in these tanks, so it's a big, exciting thing. Anyway, we're pleased to report that this batch of Jack is tasting fantastic: better than batch one did at this time.

We should be bottling this beer in the next couple of weeks, so look out for it on a shelf (and in a bar) near you in early March!