New Kitchen, New Nonsense

As both my faithful readers know, the infamous Kitchen found a new home a coupla years ago, and it took a minute for the realization to sink in: that lovely glass top stove was just not going to get along well with my lovely 10-gallon steel brew kettle. Unwilling to pester my new neighbors with 3 AM propane stove brewing sessions in the front drive, I put homebrew way back on my personal back burner for quite awhile.

Recently, however, I acquired a Pinter. This lovely little bit of homebrew equipment allows for 1.5 gallon batches of beer with a minimal amount of effort and equipment. Using Pinter's own Fresh Pac extract kits, you can create a batch of homebrew in short order with NO boiling and NO bottling! Just add  water and follow the instructions. The brew dock allows for trub to fall out and be discarded, while thebuilt-in pressure valve allows controlled carbonation right in the fermentation container once you toss it in the fridge. After a few days conditioning in the fridge, you serve it like a mini keg of draft beer.

Very cool, especially the ease and absolute lack of extra equipment needed, but it is straight up extract kit beer: the most amazing stuff ever, when it's the first batch you've made! But there are a LOT of amazing beers readily available for not much more than you pay for ingredients that don't take any more effort than opening DoorDash on your phone. But it dawned on me...this little Pinter eliminates bottling and even siphoning into a secondary, but I could still cook up my own wort! I realized I could boil up a 1.5 gallon all-grain BIB batch in a 3 gallon kettle without smashing that glass-top stove to smithereens!

So I ordered one each of all three color Pinters and at least one each of their extract kits that sounded interesting. I figured the quickest and easiest way to become familiar with these devices would be through the kits they've tested and their easy to follow instructions in their app.

So ya'll know that plan lasted thru about 4 batches. Then I got an email ad from Northern Brewer about a new strain of kveik brewer's yeast they had available, which of course sent me down a new rabbit hole. I ended up ordering several different strains of kveik yeast, mostly dry yeast from Kveik Yeastery. 

Once the yeast packets arrived, I started up a batch of Pinter's Fresh Batch Space Hopper IPA West Coast Edition extract kit. I'd tried this kit once before and the results were OK, but it could definitely have been more bitter. So instead of the yeast included with Pinter's Fresh Pack, I pitched Kveik Yeastery's Ebbegarden strain. It is supposed to ferment well between 64 and 100 degrees F, adding fruit notes and enhancing bitterness. It started blowing krausen out the carbonation valve less than 8 hours later and was still showing a little activity when I tossed the Pinter in the fridge more than a week later!

I'll be sure to check back in and let all three of ya'll know how it turns out! (Yes, faithful readers, a third has been added to your small but devoted gathering. Whether this new reader has the fortitude to maintain your unearned and so earnest interest remains to be discovered, but it's nice to have fresh set of eyes looking over my silly rambling!)

Being entirely out of practice, I'm just gonna toss some random pics in here at the bottom of this post. Thanks for hangin' out with me for a minute and hopefully I'll have something interesting for all ya'll soon!