Best Stout Yet

Today I bottled the clone of Rogue's Shakespeare Oatmeal Stout that Donny and I made.  This one tastes so good that I wanted to drink it right from the bottling bucket!
I used all stubby bottles this time with black caps.  Either this was a really good recipe and/or the improvements I implemented on this brew really paid off.
This batch yielded 53 bottles at a cost of only 65 cents per bottle! (Including the labels yet to be created.)

Homebrewer's reflection:  If the beer is really good, you want to share it and have little left for yourself.  If the beer didn't turn out well, you've got the whole batch to yourself!

Saturday Brew Day

Donny Abbott and I brewed a clone of Rogue's Shakespeare Stout on Saturday.  We used my brew-in-a-bag system with some new modifications which I'll cover in additional posts.
In spite of 3 boys to watch this was fun for us and was probably my smoothest and best "everything-worked-right" brew day.  A big thank you to Donny (and Jack) for the assistance and company!  Your interest and enthusiasm made my day.
This is a big beer calling for over 14 lbs. of grain for a 5 gallon batch.  And for the first time ever my original gravity came in higher than the recipe called out, at 1.074 !!

In brief, what I did differently this time:

• Adjusted water chemistry
• Insulated my brew kettle/keg
• Used my new bucket and grate sparging method
• Used DME to hit my pre-boil gravity
• Aerated the wort with an aquarium pump