Author: Brian Allen

Karen and I kegged our bock beer last night. We still have one beer working. And, I expect that we will be kegging it this weekend. But, the beer is still going strong.

We still have not found all of our Mini Kegs, but they should turn up some day.

Our beers have been working nicely for some time now. We have one that has all, but stopped so that means only one thing.

Time to keg that beer!

I would be kegging it today, but I determined that I was out of CO2. (You need to fill the keg with CO2 prior to filling in order to remove the air.)

Normally, I keg my beer in soda kegs. This time, I had wanted to use Fass Frisch Mini Kegs which hold about 1 1/3 gallons. I received these as a gift years ago from my mother, but I have never used them. I am missing the bung which seals the keg. I may have to switch back to using my soda kegs, but I want to try these mini kegs so that I could take keg to parties. “Have beer will travel” has always been my idea planning ahead.

We are starting out by testing our immersion chiller. It worked well. We were able to reduce to temperature of 2 gallon to the 80 in just a few minutes. But, failure struck with the outlet hose burst do to over heating.

Chalk that up to not thinking!

New technique:
We are putting the chiller in after we turn off the gas burner. This should allow the temperature to start dropping.

Our first beer is High Red Tide Bock which is made from 7.7 lbs light malt extract, 1 lb Weyermann Light Munich, and 4 oz. Muntons Roasted Barley. I don't remember the type of hops. I'll be using a White Labs German Ale/Kolsch yeast.

Our second beer is called Vincent's Wee Heavy. It is called this because of the 11 lbs of light malt extract used. The speciality grains Muntons Crystal 60 and Roasted Barley are inlcuded.