Happy President's Day

Happy President's Day from Frostbite Brewing Co.! Today reminds me that I need to do more research on the history of homebrewing in the United States as I have read that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin were all homebrewers. It would be interesting to find some of the recipes that they used and brew a similar style. Although I imagine that the quality of the ingredients and the methods they used would be primitive in today's age of liquid yeast vials, dozens of hop varieties, and proper sanitization techniques.

I have a few beers to update everyone on since it has been almost a month since the last post. My plan is to do a series of updates today on each beer that was brewed. The Irish Red Ale from the last post was bottled on February 2, 2010 and so it should be ready to go mid-March. I have brewed two beers since the last post, the "Rainy Day" India Pale Ale and "Wake and Bake" Coffee Stout, both styles that I brewed before.

Yesterday I spent much of the day working with bottles. Elise and I botttled the Rainy Day IPA but before doing that I cleaned out my bottle collection in the basement and scrubbed the labels off of them. To do that I have a jet spray washer that attaches to the faucet in the kitchen that sprays water at high pressure to clean out the inside of the bottle. Lately the bottles that I have been getting have been fairly clean from everyone, but just reminder to thoroughly wash the bottles before storing them otherwise mold and other nastiness will grow inside them. After spray washing them, I soak the bottles in boiling water and a solution called Powder Brite Wash "PBW" that cleans the bottles and breaks down the paper and glue on the labels. After the labels are scrubbed off, then are then placed in the dishwasher and a cycle is run without any detergent. The dishwasher is used to rinse the bottles and the heat dry cycle is an additional way of sanitizing the bottles. Finally, I place the bottles on a new toy that I bought called a bottle tree that allows the bottles to dry off and make it easier to organize when getting ready to bottle the beer. Here are the "before and after" pictures of the bottles soaking and all over and then easily organized with the bottle tree:

Once again, you can see how much work goes into bottling as you have approximately 48 bottles to clean where with a keg you have one. Part of the joy of homebrewing to me is sharing my beer with others so I really don't mind the work when I have the time to do it. Just a reminder to all to save your reusable bottles and thoroughly wash them prior to storing them. Thank you again to those who have been supporting the brewery to allow me to buy new brewing toys (see above and previous posts), ingredients, and continue learning the art brewing!