Brew day tomorrow!

Edit: This morning (monday) I woke up and realized that I didn't buy any more carboys this weekend, so I can't brew the chocolate stout. I would just bottle the mango-honey beer which has been sitting in my plastic fermenter for a year now, but I left some of my bottling stuff at goody's. I may still figure out a way to do it tonight, which would allow me to brew Tuesday.

Hopefully I won't have insomnia tonight and I will be up early enough to get everything I've planned done. I am hoping to make the 3 metheglins, a chocolate stout, and fix Berber's imperial red ale by pitching new yeast. I am thinking of naming the red ale "Mr. Kim's Enriched Microbrew" since not only are we 'enriching' it by dry-hopping it with a LOT of hops, but I bet could probably make a pretty sweet label using a screen shot from that episode of Its Always Sunny. Berber and I watched it tonight and the beer they used looked like it was actually just a basic American adjunct lager. Whatever.

I completely can't find my recipe I used for my chocolate stout last time. I can probably recreate it pretty much, but this time I want to use a ton of pale chocolate malt. That stuff really did wonders for the last batch. The reason I can not find my chocolate stout recipe, is because the first time I brewed it, I didnt have a pen or paper. But I did have a permanent marker and was brewing without a shirt on, so I wrote it upside down on my belly. I finally got around to copying it down a few days later but lost the paper I copied it down on. I still remembered it a couple weeks later though and wrote it in my brewing notebook, which I apparently lost as well.

The metheglins I am making are using mead-spicing kits from Ambrosia Farm in Orrtanna, Pennsylvania, purchased by Goody's aunt and uncle and given to him for Kwanzaa or something. The recipes state they are derived from examples in The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby Kt. Opened, published in 1669. They are entitled "Spice Mead", "May Mead", and "Midsummer Mead". The spices include:
Spice Mead- crystallized ginger (ginger and sugar), cinnamon, rosehips, nutmeg.
May Mead- rosehips, woodruff herb, meadowsweet herb, hawthorn herb & flower, red clover flower, ground hemlock.
Midsummer Mead- rosehips, elderflower, chamomile, spearmint, meadowsweet, vervain.

For the metheglyns, I am first going to have to make a tea of each set of spices. I will add the tea and the rest of the spices to each of 3 sanitized fermenters. Then I am going to make 3 gallons of must using 8 pounds of honey, and the spices and herbs. This should leave me with 3 gallons of mead, with enough fermentable sugar to get to just over 12 percent alcohol. When I add it to the spice teas, it should come out to 12 percent alcohol after it ferments. I will split up the must into 3 equal parts, and add each part to a fermenter, aerate, and pitch some yeast starter. These should be done fermenting, clarifying, and conditioning by whenever I have a graduation party, Although I will probably only crack a bottle of each within the next year. Ken Schramm has been going on and on about aging meads at least a couple years in what I've been reading in the Compleat Meadmaker the last few days, so I figured I'll start making a bunch to hide away and forget about for 5 years.

If I have more time and CO2 left in the tank, I also want to bottle the 2 liters of a special release beer I have in a swingtop growler. I will have to be careful not to allow any oxygen to come into contact with the beer by using the counter-pressure filler that Berber bought last December. We'll see if it happens.