Wick's Home Brew

I don’t know if you follow me on Twitter (@wickdawg) or not and saw my tweet about two of my beers submitted to the National Homebrew Competition receiving 1st place. So as I prepare my beers for the final round submission I am going to document my lessons learned day by day as the deadline approaches.

Lesson Learned #5 - Patience 

If you know me on a personal level, you know my patience comes and goes. It used to be around quite often, but here lately, patience has not been a virtue for me.  I am reasoning as to why my patience is running a little thin right now. I couldn’t in my right mind think that I would have made it to the second round of National Homebrew Competition.

I’ve only been home brewing for a little over a year. The two beers that placed first were probably batch numbers 11 and 12, all grain batch numbers 2 and 3. As you could tell from my first lesson, I didn’t take very good notes, if any at all, so I’m not sure about the first numbers, but I know my Chocolate Hazelnut Porter was my second all grain batch and the brown was the third. So now I am trying to wait patiently for the two beers I brewed this past week to ferment out and get ready to be kegged. Here is the rough thing for me. Normally I wouldn’t worry about this so much, but next week I will be unable to rack my beers to the kegs. So I am going to have to do it on fermentation day 10 for the CHP and  day 9 for the brown ale. Ten days of fermentation is about right. According to Jamil that is. Listening to his podcasts he says 10 days is normally when he knows things in your carboys are done what they needed to be done. So I’ll take a sample out of each and hope both of them went through the diacetyl rest, and rack to the keg and start carbonating those bad boys. 

This post is mainly for me to RDWHHB (Relax, don’t worry, have a home brew).

<Deep Breath> - Ok, I’m good to go and ready for a home brew.