The keg of Steve and Jane’s wedding beer ran out this week, so we needed a replacement.  The second half of the Pliny the Elder clone has been in a five gallon carboy for months, so I kegged it up, dry-hopping it with two ounces of Centennial and an ounce of Simcoe.  The final gravity was a very low 1.005, which means that from its original gravity of 1.075 it is 9.2% alcohol by volume.  That’s quite the douple IPA!  The keg was force-carbonated and tapped immediately, although it will likely take a week or two for the effect of the dry hop to come through.

The Cols-ch (our name for the Kolsch style ale we brewed a couple of weeks ago) is lagering in a fridge now, right about 35 degrees.  A few more weeks of that should get the yeast to clear out, then it can be kegged.  The yeast I harvested from the Cols-ch last weekend was given back to John yesterday so he could brew with it one last time.

The Kolsch style ale we brewed last week has been in primary for 8 days and a gravity sample showed that it was ready to rack to secondary.  One fermenter has reached 1.014, the other 1.015.  The ale is still very cloudy, so this yeast definitely does not want to flocculate.  Each primary was racked to a five-gallon carboy, and I saved the leftover yeast in a couple of sanitized growlers.  There wasn’t enough leftover wort to fill a growler.

We are now cooling this ale down to as close to freezing as possible, where it needs to lager for a month.  It should have cleared up by then, at which time we will keg it and force-carbonate it for serving.