There are many rules when it comes to brewing, from sanitation to listening to music, but the FIRST rule of brewing is, something will always go wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, but not the way you wanted it to go. Basically, there’s no such thing as a perfect brew day, that was our Friday night.
While we didn’t brew, we did have things to do, things that couldn’t get done. Here’s a list of things we wanted to accomplish:

1. Sample and bottle our cream ale.

2. Filter, keg, and carbonate the Red Rye-der.

3. Add another round of raisins to the oatmeal raisin brown ale.

A decent amount of work to do, but we were up to the task. Right off the bat we had a problem. The CO2 regulator on the three kegs of cream ale that were nestled in the cooler carbonating over the last week, didn’t show pressure…hmmmm. What happened? Turns out we had a very slow leak between the regulator and the kegs. Is there a possibility that the beer was still able to carbonate before the tank ran out? Yes! Was that the case? Nope. It was as flat as flat can be. So, what do you do? Luckily we have a back up tank. It put us a week behind, but it’s not the worst thing that could happen.

Before we hooked up the back up tank to the cream ale, we had to use it to push the Red Rye-der through the filters and into the kegs. I do have pictures of that!

Fermentation and dry hop complete! This beer is ready to be filtered and kegged.

Filling up the conical to mix the three buckets of the Red Rye-der.

Seth monitoring the transfer.

Conical full, ready to transfer to the kegs.

From the conical to the keg.

The filtering setup looks like this.

Here’s a closer look at the beer going through the filters. Pretty beer!

Here’s the filtered beer filling up a different keg.

Filtering can take a while, so you have a beer, and chat, and Brian has demon eyes, no big deal.

So the Red Rye-der is filtered and kegged and pressurized, but not carbonating. We had to put the back up tank on the cream ale to finish the job. We also checked the oatmeal raisin brown and it was no where near ready for the raisins. So we went 1 for 3 on our to do list. 33% in school is failing, but we still consider this a win. We didn’t lose any beer, just a little bit of time. We’ll make it up this Friday.

Until next time…