Yet another disaster! If I didn't drink so much I might start to get discouraged.
Actually, today wasn't so bad really, the usual spills and so on, but I did manage to break my hydrometer (this happens to every home brewer eventually), so I have:
- No way to confirm the starting gravity of my beer, and:
- Tiny pieces pieces of very thin broken glass in the bottom of my shower.
I also managed to cut my thumb, but I don't know if it was on the glass from the hydrometer or not.
Anyway, the beer itself! I picked up a 450ml jar of pure concentrated date juice from the Italian Center little while ago, and I decided to combine it with a Brewhouse Prairie Wheat kit. Based on some pretty much unfounded estimates of the extract value of the date juice, I calculated a starting gravity of about 1.052, not that much higher than the ~1.046 expected from the unaltered kit. With the Safale US-05 yeast, I'm expecting to wind up with something around 5.2% which isn't bad for a nice drinkable summer beer, and I think the date flavour will be subtle but detectable.
Once it's fermented about a week or so, I'm planning to rack it on top of the very dark-roasted Hungarian oak chips I mentioned in a previous entry and give it a month or so on those. So my nice summery beer should be ready just in time for fall.
I'll rewrite this post with pictures, once again, after I get the technology to get them off my camera.
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