Honey Lemon now on tap!!!

After much waiting and some expenses, the keg is finally set up and running!  I now have Honey Squeeze My Lemon on tap.  It was a bit of a process figuring everything out but now that it's up and running, nothing could be better. 

This is a 20lb CO2 tank and a 5 gal Cornelius keg (often called a Corny keg for short)  

For all of this to come together I ended up buying practically every piece from a different person.  I got the CO2 tank off of Craigslist and the keg from a homebrewer from another homebrew club.  The regulator came from a catalog from Blue Hills brewery and the fittings and tubing came from the Homebrew Emporium in Cambridge.

This is the regulator the gauge on the top tell you the pressure your putting into the keg and the gauge on the far left tells you the pressure inside the CO2 tank.  The red lever on the bottom that looks like it has a screw coming out of it, is actually a valve and that's not a screw its called a hose barb and you hook up your tubing to that and that's where the CO2 travels to your keg.

It's a little easier to see how it works now that its set up.  The tube running from the CO2 tank is running into the keg and the other tube is running from the keg to the tap.  That's not beer though, this was just sanitizer that I ran through the lines to make sure everything was clean before I added any beer.

Time to brew and have a brew

There it is, the Honey lemon from a tap! Mmmmm beer!  The green pellets that every one tells me looks like rabbit food is actually hops and that is lemon peel next to it.  This was taken during the brewing of the next batch of HSML.

I currently don't have a refrigerator yet so the keg is residing in the bulkhead area of the basement where the temp is a nice cool 55 degrees.  It would probably be colder if it wasn't so darn nice out side but you won't hear me complaining.

Open Fermentation

After our visit to Geary's Brewery in Maine, I got inspired by the open fermentation and decided to try one for myself.  The results turned out fantastic I must say.  I made a Black butte porter clone for my friend Jim.  He's coming home from the army after 8 years of service 2 tours in Iraq and 1 in Afghanistan.  I think he deserves a good beer don't you?  Anyways I made this beer like I would most other beers except for fermentation.  I decided to oxygenate the wort after pitching the yeast.  I used a regular aquarium air pump with a clean and sanitized tube and airstone.  The tubing and airstone are fairly cheap at the pet store.  I added the air for about 15 min.

That is not yeast yet, its just foam from the wort.  Though it does look the same.  The yeast was added before I put the tubing in so that the yeast could get a good start.

This was taken about 8 hours later you can see all the yeast already on the sides. Success!!

 It's hard to see in the next 3 pictures (I should have taken a video) but as I lowered the lighter towards the foam you can notice the flame getting dim and going out.  This is because there is no oxygen on the surface of the foam.  It's putting out so much carbon dioxide that it forms its own little atmosphere.  Pretty neat huh!

This next picture was from the third day.  You can see a ton of yeast working hard to make that beer!!

We recently tasted one beer before Jim's arrival to make sure it turned out okay and boy did it ever.  Probably one of my best batches to date!! When I first looked into this method many books and experts say its a big giant no no.  However if you have lots of experience and your able to keep your brewing area very clean and you have the time to transfer as soon as the primary fermentation finishes, I think you'd be alright to try this out.  As Charlie Papazian always says relax don't worry have a homebrew!!