It’s Monday morning again and that means it’s time for an update. Friday night we got together to get a ton of work done and quickly realized our workload was going to get a little bit lighter. We were scheduled to transfer the Hot Blonde to secondary, skim, transfer and pitch the yeast in our Brown Sugar and Bacon Storter, and build a serving station for the competition we’ve entered on October 11th.

Brian and I were waiting for Seth to arrive and I decided to check the cooler to see what beer we had left over. When I opened the lid to the cooler every beer inside was frozen and had exploded. This raised a concern. We had both of our buckets of the Storter wort cold crashing in the cooler to separate any fat that may have been left on the bacon. We cleaned up the broken bottles and pulled the buckets from the cooler. They hit the garage floor with a heavy thud like a couple of cinder blocks. They were frozen solid. This isn’t the end of the world, more like a minor inconvenience. A set back. See we hadn’t even pitched the yeast yet, if we had, we’d be in trouble. An entire 10 gallon batch down the drain. This just delays our start of fermentation until Friday. Frustrating, but not a huge deal.

Next!

We transferred our Hot Blonde to secondary, not a lot of excitement here. Actually I only took three pictures and, I’m sorry, they aren’t all that good. Here they are anyway.

Fermentation complete, transfer to secondary in 3, 2, 1…

Filling the bucket.

I’m disappointed with this picture because you can’t even see the beautiful little jalapeño floating around. Oh well, another week and it’ll be ready to keg and carbonate.

And now for something new.

We built our serving station for the competition and I have plenty of pictures. It’s not 100% complete as we have some finishing touches to apply, but you’ll get the idea and I’ll post the finished station when it’s done.

Men, beer, and power tools. Doesn’t get much more manly than that!

Until they did this.

Getting started with the frame.

Adding a platform.

It’s going to need a top!

Cutting corrugated steel with tin snips. There were some bloody fingers that night.

Bending the edges back to shape.

I had to add this photo because my fingers look creepily long. Don’t know if it’s the reflection or if my fingers are just creepily long.

Attaching the corrugated steel to the serving station.

Drilling a hole for the draft tower.

Seth’s homemade draft tower in place.

The most Regular Guy looking serving station you’ll ever see!

Seth and I pretending to serve beers. Or just hugging it out. You decide.

Well, that’s it. That was our Friday night in pictures. We’re going to stain the wood, add some cool stuff to the tap handles and put the Regular Guy logo on the front. It’s gonna be tight y’all!

Until next time…