I haven't brewed anything in several months (probably closer to a year). I used to brew every 2 weeks like clockwork and kept that up for a couple of years but I have just been too busy (and truth be told too tired) to brew lately.
Summer is here and I have no homebrew on tap and that's just not a good thing for a self-sufficient geek. Why should I buy beer when I make beer so much better (and cheaper) than I can buy?
So, it was time to roll out the brewing gear and get a batch of cream ale in the fermenter on sunday. I spent saturday cleaning and scrubbing my mash tun, hot liquor tank and brew kettle. I took the time to make some test runs on my brew sculpture, fix leaky hoses and make sure everything was in tip-top shape. One of the keys to brewing very good beer is to be extremely anal about cleanliness and sanitation so I spent a long time scrubbing out the fermenter (my temperature controlled stainless steel conical) and all the hot and cold side equipment. Got up on sunday, made my yeast starter so it would be spinning on the stir plate all day and went to work.
I was worried that I'd be out of practice and clumsy but I nailed all my numbers dead on. My strike temps were dead on, all my volumes and gravity were perfect as well. My grain was still perfectly good (unmilled grain doesn't go bad unless you store it improperly) and the sweet wort tasted very good coming out of the mash tun, with the bitter wort (post boil) tasting equally good going into the fermenter. Only hiccup during the day was that somehow my refractometer ended up broken and I added cascade hops for the finishing (flavor) addition instead of strisselspalt. It will still be very good, just have more of a grapefruit citrus note than the apricot that the strisselspalt gives it.
All in all, it was a good brewday. Hot sweaty work, but it is all worth it when you wake up on monday morning and walk out into the garage to see the airlock happily bubbling away and you know in just a few short weeks you'll have a keg of some of your finest summertime BBQ beer, all for pennies on the dollar.