My Chugger Pump was probably the best homebrew investment I've made, especially since I do 11 gallon batches. But being able to whirlpool when I drop the immersion chiller in has cut my cooling time in half so that makes it worth it right there. Plus the ease of recirculating the mash and sparge To vorlauf has saved me a ton of time.

A close second is my stir plate.

Yea my 2nd year cascade and centennial plants are going nuts to, I plan to do a wet hopped beer later this season as well.

I had a very long brew day yesterday brewing up an imperial stout. It started when I woke up to my starter having overflowed like crazy during the night which resuleted in a bunch of yeast being lost and my house smelling like bread. All went well until I added 6 lbs of DME towards the end of the boil to boost my gravity because my tun was too small to hold more grain. Well, it's been a long time since I've used extract and when I stopped stirring for just a few seconds, and I had a boil over.

All in all I guess I had more boil off than anticipated and over shot my gravity, ending up with 5.5 gallons of 1.108 beer when I wanted 6 gallons of 1.090 beer. Hopefully my yeast can chew through this. Any of you have experience with a beer this big?

Sweet. I have second year Cascade and Zeus plants and they're doing awesome as well. About 12 feet tall already, and much thinker bines than last year.

Ive not made a beer that big, I think 1.090 is the biggest Ive made but it sounds awesome. How long was the boil? Whats your typical boil off %? Was the boil more vigorous than normal? Did you think about boiling a gallon or a 1/2 gallon of water and topping off?

Thats the big difference in my plants this year the bines, especially at the base are the width of about two #2 pencils. Im expecting a pretty big yield especially from my Centennial plant, the 2 cascades are ~4' tall but got a much later start for some reason.

Oh and regarding boil overs, FERMCAP FTW!!! It surprises me that not everyone uses it. My kettle is huge but I use it in my starter all the time, I can boil 2L in my 2L flask with it.

I'm going to try it. I also don't have trouble in my kettle but have a hard time boiling 1300ml in my 2-liter flask.

Works well for fermentation as well, wheather youre pushing the limits of your flask in a starter or short on head space in your fermentation vessel of choice.

I will definitely try FERMCAP next time, thanks for the suggestion. The boil was 90 minutes and I kept it as low as possible to try to limit boil off. By the time I took my gravity, it was in my better bottle and I just went with it. I've never actually measured my boil off, so that was stupid on my part, I just assumed BeerSmith's value was going to give me a good ballpark.

Anyways, good news is that it's got a nice krausen right now so fermentation has started. I'm keeping my chamber low to start (~62F) and I'll raise it as it goes on. We'll see how low I can get it, but I'm allowing about 2.5 months for fermentation.

Any Florida brewers planning on entering the Commander SAAZ competition in September? The homebrew club I'm in is hosting it and at the meeting the other day they said they are expecting at least 700 entrants across all categories. This will be the first year I enter it and I'm trying to decide what I want to brew coming up to enter. Think I'm going to try and do a few lagers and few ales, should be fun.

Im up in the air about entering any more competitions. I just entered 3 beers in the local competition and didn't place. I got the scoresheets back and got a comment like 'not to style but if you tweak it it will be a winning beer'. I don't want to brew everything to style and if that's the case I obviously won't win no matter how good the beer is.

I entered two comps and never received scoresheets or comments from either one. That kind of turned me off to comps and I haven't bothered since.

That really, really sucks. Was it a BJCP competition or no?

The only one ive ever entered I also didnt get scoresheets from. I emailed them asking where I could find them and they never even responded -_-

Doing any non BJCP competition is a waste of time, Ive done a few and they are always awful. For me, entering a competition is all about the feedback so if you dont get a detailed scoresheet like the ones you get in BJCP sanctioned events just dont waste your time.

I entered a non BJCP event 2 weekends ago only because it was at a bar that a friends family owns, otherwise I wouldnt have even bothered. There is a local, to me, BJCP event every summer that I enter with about 100-150 entries that I think I will stick to every year.

I believe one of them was BJCP, but I just went back and looked at their club website and I can't tell for sure. I thought at first they possibly lost my entries, but about a month after the contest my check was cashed, and the check had been attached to my entry forms and elastic banded around one of the bottles. (Per the instructions.)

The other one I entered I can't remember the exact name of the club or contest and am having trouble finding any info about it.

At some point this summer we should do another Thread Brew like we were talking about before the outage.

I Propose...

A SMaSh brew with the malts and hops of your choosing, to the style requirements of an APA.

I'm moving at some point this summer but depending on the date I should be able to do it. Count me in for now!

How does this work? Everyone just brews at the same time?

Pretty much. We all decide on a recipe and all try to brew as close to that as possible. A date is chosen to brew by and once everyone's is ready everybody ships out to another person and they post reviews, etc.

Yea last time we all brewed the same ESB recipe from Brewing Classic Styles and traded a few bottles between the group, it was fun to try all the different beers especially since most of us used a different english yeast strain.

This time I am proposing a bit more brewers freedom. Everyone brew a single malt single hop beer with the malt and the hop of your choosing, with the recipe falling with the guidelines of an American Pale Ale which would show off the flavors from each hop and malt the best.

What kind of grains would be available for use in the APA? Is stuff like Munich/Golden Promise/Maris Otter okay? And then just any American variety of hop? Do we want to stick to the same strain of yeast WL001/WY1056/S-05?

Here are the vitals:
http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/style10.php#1a

Im not saying it has to be an APA per se, but to build the recipe within the style guidelines of an APA as far as SG and IBUs go. But yea pretty much whatever base grain you want to use, for me Id probably look at using something Im not super familiar with since thats the point in a SMaSh.

Yeast should certainly be a clean fermenting American Ale yeast like you said (WL001/WY1056/S-05 etc) thats also a standard for a SMaSh so you can pick up what your base grain and single hop are giving you.

Ive only ever done one SMaSh before, it was a Marris Otter Simcoe only beer and it was fantastic I'll probably brew it again this summer. But for this I'll go another route entirely, specifically looking for a hop Im not all that familiar with like Nelson Sauvin.

Im not sure about everyone else but my summer brew calendar is filling up quickly, so we should set a date soon.

What does the term SMaSH mean?

Anybody want some East Kent Goldings and Hallertau Tradition pellets? They are 2011 harvest and have been stored vacuum sealed and frozen. I bought a pound of each and now I'm realizing that most styles I would use these for seldom require more than an ounce or two per batch. I don't like to store hops for more than 2 years so I would rather give some away than see them go to waste.

The first 2 people that live in the US, quote this post, and pm me your mailing address, I'll send 4 ounces of each hop sometime next week.