Capitol City Brewing - Sept. 19

Thoughts on GABF today ... not much again.

Tropical storm Isabel is all the talk today. If you see the news they are concentrating on the worst of it, of course. We fared pretty well, although a lot of folks are still out of electricity. In the brewery we got our brew done yesterday around 2 p.m. and left around 2:30 p.m. to take care of home issues like putting outdoor items away so they would not fly off. Of course that never happened, but best to be prepared.

In the brewery, we shut off all the temperature controls in case there was a power surge that knocked out the refrigeration unit. We relied on the temp in the tank and the insulation of it to keep the finished beers in serving vessels and the cooled beers in the fermenters chilled. There was on problem though, we had an actively fermenting Amber brew that the cooling just could not be turned off of. If the refrigeration went down the uncontrollable heat rise of fermentation might ruin the batch. We had to just let that one go as it were.

Came in this morning and everything was fine. Electricity was on and the refrigeration unit (mounted on the roof) was in perfect running order. Loss of temperature was only a few degrees per vessel and the Amber brew we were concerned about did not suffer a bit. Got in to work a little late but we are brewing a batch of Root Beer that will only take a half day.

The brewers will be home early to clean up after the storm. Thankfully Isabel was not too bad of a tropical storm.

I am one week away from Denver and all the GABF activity.