The yeast has been pitched five times, so we’re not reusing it any more, and we thought we’d take a couple of weeks off from brewing since we have a good supply of beer in reserve right now.  We did keg up the second half of the Alpha King brewed back in June, mostly to free up another secondary for use in racking the Pliny the Elder clone.  The Alpha King was 1.024 back in June but it has dropped to 1.012 and tastes quite good.  I dry hopped it with an ounce each of Ahtanum, Centennial, and Chinook, and force-carbonated it.

The Pliny clone went from 1.075 down to 1.010 in a week, on both fermenters.  That’s already 8.5% ABV.  We racked them to secondary and dry hopped each carboy with four ounces of Columbus pellets.  The pellets caused quite a bit of foaming due to all of the nucleation points, so I had to change the airlocks a few times.  We thought about racking the beer to primaries without the yeast, but decided not to since we were using pellets instead of leaf.  In hindsight it would have been better to use primaries and include some leaf hops.  I don’t think we’d ever dry-hopped in the secondary though, so you learn by experimentation.