State of the Brewery

I've been brewing for a little over 2 months now and will be boiling up batches 10, 11, and 12 this weekend. I'm still a total noob, but I have learned some things.

The biggest, I think, is this: Beer needs time.

When I first got started I came across the 1-2-3 rule. One week in the primary, 2 weeks in the secondary, and 3 weeks in the bottle. Of course there are better ways to tell when beer should go from one stage to the next and every beer is different, but this is meant as a general guideline. I followed it - kind of.

There are a couple of things about this rule that I now know:
1. These are minimums.
2. Kegging instead of bottling does not change the rule.

Let me start with item two. For whatever reason, I assumed that because I was kegging, I did not need to wait 3 weeks to drink. I thought this three weeks was for bottle conditioning to take place and carbonate the beer. Because I was force-carbing in the keg, I figured I could drink when the beer was carbed - about 2 days after kegging. I found out pretty quickly that this was not the case and set a 1 week keg rule. So instead of 1-2-3, I was practicing 1-2-1. This still had me drinking pretty green beer, although I was too inexperienced to realize it at first.

Regarding item one, this is definitely a bare minimum across the board. My batches are rarely if ever ready to secondary after 7 days, secondary can go longer if needed, and the conditioning part could be a lot longer.

So here is my new rule:
- Primary until within a few points of target final gravity
- Secondary until final gravity or 2 weeks, which ever is longer
- Keg condition at room temperature for 2 weeks
- Cold condition/carb 1 week

Certain beers can go a little quicker, like some wheat beers which are typically ready to drink faster. Others may take longer, like the high gravity Strong Ale I'm getting ready to brew. The point is - I'm done drinking green beer.

The picture is batch #5 (a wheat beer) which is still on tap and was brewed about 7 weeks ago - by far the longest a batch has ever survived around here. It's not the greatest beer in the world by any stretch, but it is the best one to ever come out of my tap. I believe this is because, by chance not design, it followed these new rules. Compare that picture to the picture from batch #1 - you can see the difference. If anything batch #1 should have been cleaner looking than batch #5 but you can see this is not the case. Far from it.

All my upcoming batches will follow these rules by design. This sucks in a way because I'm going to run out of beer again, but I would rather run out than waste soon-to-be good beer.

So until then - STEP AWAY FROM THE KEG!