Brrrr! It’s damn cold in this corner of East Anglia right now, despite the clear skies and sharp sunshine. Good weather for conditioning beer though, so it’s time to stick on some warm clothes, put a lame pun in a blog post headline, and get to grips with cleaning endless vessels and moving beer between them.
The Boxshed Dark Garden ’09 has dropped perfectly in secondary and now needs to continue its journey towards 80 or so pint glasses. Later today it will be moved into a Cornelius keg, ten swingtops and a King Keg. The Cornie and most of the bottles will stay here, but the KK will go and live in my brother’s own shed, conditioning for the festive season.
We’ve been very pleased with the smells emanating from the Boxshed Timmy’s Original FVs over the last week and have high hopes for this well-hopped Best Bitter. It’s already hit 1.014 in primary on its way to a 1.012 final gravity, so it can also be moved now, this time off the yeast and trub and into clean secondary FVs.
Clean. Now that’s a deceptively evil little word. After the day jobs today, we need to clean at least one crate of bottles, two Cornelius kegs, two King Kegs, four FVs and a bundle of assorted pipes, jugs, connectors, taps and bottling doo-dads. I won’t be the last brewer to complain about it, but cleaning is no fun at all in any circumstances, and especially on a cold day with season old beer stone doing its best to resist the brush, bleach and iodine treatment.
Ah well, if you want to get a beer on, get a warm hat on.
This is why it’s very, very important to remember the time spent freezing alone with a hose and a bottle of Iodophor when you finally get to drink a few cosy pints with friends. And of course it’s precisely why that same beer means so much more when you created it yourselves from raw ingredients in a breezy shed.
And it could most certainly be a whole lot worse – just ask ‘brew from 592’.
Anyone brewing this week?
The Boxshed Brewery 
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