Red X Gone give it to ya (now it's not sadly..)

Grains, yeast and hops we've never used before. Oh and a broken hydrometer at the end of it. What could possibly go wrong here as we brew up our latest work: the Irish Red Ale we've 'Red X Gone give it to ya?'


WAIT, THAT NAME SOUNDS FAMILIAR SOMEHOW..

Well spotted! It's a combination of two things. Best Malz Red X grain for making homebrews with a lovely red tinge:

And this amazing song from the Dog Man X himself, DMX:

I discovered red ale's years ago at some Jazz club I can't remember. What was the red ale I was drinking? No idea. But it's a sound basis to brew one as our latest batch here at Beers in my backyard. And so using the Android App Wort, I played around with some ingredients until I got something close to where things should be in terms of color, bitterness and alcohol by volume.

Of course the morning of brew day I had a brainwave in the shower of getting the ABV just a bees tadge higher by throwing in some dextrose just before the boil ended:

What I failed to realize by adding this extra in? It changes the amounts of water etc needed. This may possibly have something to do with the low starting gravity I ended up with at the end of the session. Or it could be that it didn't boil long enough...it could be anything really!

Anyway as usual, I've documented the journey with a couple of videos along the way. Firstly getting some 'experts' (and I used that term very loosely) on board to help me with ingredients:

(I'll cringe later on in life about this one but at the time it was fun to make.)

And then brew day was this weekend and with the help of my little bloke Jackson, we got right into the swing of things:

I'm happy to report that one day after brewday, things are happily bubbling away in the 5 litre carboy.

 The other half in the $5 fermenter? Not so much. But I suspect that has something to do with a slight air leak around the airlock inserted. Must look into a grommet to make a tighter fit..

Sadly too when cleaning up this morning, my hydrometer went bang and dropped its iron balls..




Luckily I've got a couple of weeks to go before I'm going to need another one.

So that was my latest brewing weekend, how did yours go?

ONE WEEK LATER

Things are smelling fruity (in a good way.) There's just one little niggling problem going on with our latest brew here:

TWO DAYS TO BOTTLING..

Oh god, what the hell happened here? And why did I think it was a good idea to siphon the stuff out of the carboy into the large fermenter? (I did it because I was hoping to make it a bit clearer..)

Things have gone...sour...damnit!

Well it wasn't going that great anyway...but disappointed none the less..on to the next one.