Monday, August 17, 2009

Copper Head Cask

At some point this week I will be preparing Copper Head Pale Ale for its assembled delivery systems, when they arrive that is. One of the things I wanted to do with my beer once I got here was to get into cask conditioning my beer as well as the bottle conditioning I have been doing up to now.

When I went to buy my brewing kit in Columbia, I noticed that the shop had small wooden casks, just what I wanted! At $120 a pop for a 5 gallon cask, I decided that cask conditioning could wait until I had a job and had finished eating into my savings. I still wanted to try something different though, and then I remembered reading somewhere that you could use a polypin as a form of "cask". Finding information about polypin conditioning was a piece of cake, especially as Boak and Bailey's blog is right up there in a Google search for "using a polypin as a cask", several emails later and I am fairly confident about my upcoming Copper Head Cask.

There was only one problem, I couldn't find a polypin supplier on any of the American homebrew websites. Somehow though I stumbled upon the fact that a "polypin" in the States is a "cubitainer" and thus ordered the necessaries from Northern Brewer. Not wanting to risk all my brew exploding over the storage space, I got just a 1 US gallon cubitainer and will bottle the rest in 12oz bottles, that's 375ml for the metric guys.

Apparently the cubitainer stuff takes about a week to condition, so it should be ready for when my good friend Jay comes down from Philadelphia for the Labor Day weekend. Some of the bottles will make it down to Richmond when I finally meet E.S. Delia of Relentless Thirst fame, and if you haven't already read his excellent blog, get over there as soon as you finish reading this. Around about now for example.

5 comments:

  1. It looks like you are involved in this website:

    http://www.pocketpubguides.com/

    Can you tell us more about the upcoming Prague book and when it will be available?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes that is one of my projects, I am aiming to have the book finished and available by the end of this month.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the plug, Al! Glad you could find a "cubitainer" - because I thought they were also called polypins in the US... go figure. Anyway, I look forward to trying Copper Head and any other goodies you might be bringing down!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi there!

    Sorry to be bothering you, but is your book available soon? I like your blog, and I think I will appreciate a book penned by you.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sorry it has been delayed, moving countries and over things kept getting in the way of it.

    However, I will have the actual text completed later today or tomorrow and then I will be sorting out the photos and once that is all done it will be ready to be published.

    ReplyDelete

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