My First DIY

After brewing the Kolsch, I realized that I desperately needed a wort chiller.  After shopping around on homebrew supply websites, I decided that it didn't look too hard, and necessity due to my self-imposed timeline dictated that I go the DIY route, rather than purchasing and waiting for a pre-made chiller to arrive.  $70, a trip to Lowes, and a realization that copper has gotten very expensive later, I had a pretty convincing looking wort chiller in my hands.

Friday I brewed the Guinness draught which will be the base of my Irish Car Bomb Stout, and I put my new tool into action.  I must say, I was very impressed with how quickly I could cool the wort to manageable temperatures.  If I were to guess, I'd say about 5 minutes from when I turned the stove off to when I was pouring the wort into the primary fermenter.

In other news, I had my first experience bottling tonight.  I finally bottled the Kolsch.  It was pretty involved, but after watching some YouTube videos, I pretty painlessly siphoned my beer from secondary into the bottling bucket.  I was three bottles short of two complete cases of 12oz. bottles, but I think for my first 5 gallon batch, netting 540oz. out of a 640oz. brew isn't too terrible I guess.  There were a few withdrawals for hydrometer measurements, and some spillage from both siphoning to secondary, and bottling splashing, which would account for most of the losses.  It tastes pretty good, I'm sure chilled and carbed it'll taste even better, but I'll know that for sure in a fortnight...

Final stats for the Kolsch were as follows:

OG - 1.039
FG - 1.005
ABV - 4.454%
IBUs - 26.68

Meanwhile, the Guinness clone is bubbling away in primary.