Caribou Slobber, first brew days in 2 years...

[sgtpeppr56]

Went to northern brewer and picked up a small batch of caribou slobber and those guys there are awesome. Told them that I taken a few years off and was using my Mr beer equipment. They were super helpful.

Using the Northern Brewer instructions, the brew session was pretty successful. Was able to get it all done in under 2 hours with not many issues.

The only issue was that my auto siphon wasn't getting a good seal, so I had to pump the liquid into the lbk. Just giving the yeast some oxygen, haha.

Hopefully this didn't do too much damage, ya think?

About 6 hours in and seeing some activity...yes!

Thanks and brew on!

[John Sand]

Great! Oxygen is necessary at this stage. Keep us posted.

[mashani]

Hurray for brew day!

Should be awesome. No reason to siphon it really, I just dump mine right into the LBCs using a big funnel. Oxygen is good. Some break material will not hurt your beer, contrary to "common knowledge", in fact someone did it on purpose as a side by side test recently and decided they actually made better beer with some break material dumped into the fermenter vs. when they carefully avoided it.

[Inkleg]

Great to see you back and brewing again. Like the others said, oxygen before fermentation = good, after fermentation = bad.

Nice to see the your LHBS was helpful too. I've ordered from them before. How big is their store?

[sgtpeppr56]

Not as big as a person would think. Size of a strip mall store maybe a tad smaller. They have 2 retail stores in MN and I think most of the shipping is from a warehouse here in the burbs.

They want you too succeed, no matter your background and beer preference. Which is nice. There is a mom and pop style brew store by me that is way snobby, all grain or don't bother us. Sad...

[Beer-lord]

There is a mom and pop style brew store by me that is way snobby, all grain or don't bother us. Sad...

I just don't get this and I hear it often. Why is it a store will treat their customers like roaches if they don't do something a certain way? Extract, if done right and with fresh ingredients, are very, very good and win awards all the time.

I did Slobber once and enjoyed it. Never had the real thing so I couldn't compare.
It's pretty cool to live close by NB to get what you need. Leave those other clowns alone.

[RickBeer]

Keep in mind that Northern is no longer owned by Chris Farley, and that the company that bought Northern (Entrepreneur Partners) also bought Midwest and combined the back offices.

Northern has locations in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and Milwaukee. Midwest has a store in Minneapolis.

Neither would be anywhere near "Mom and Pop". The volume here is via ecommerce, not retail.

Any company that treats customers with disdain deserves the result - don't shop there and make sure you tell them why. Same with companies that don't comply with laws, or are filthy. In our area, the Health Department inspects restaurants twice per year and the results are published (unfortunately NOT posted at the business in plain sight). When a business gets a poor rating, we let them know that we're not coming back.

Customer feedback, both good and bad, should be highly sought after by businesses. Put it in writing to the owner.

[sgtpeppr56]

Agree Rickbeer, i left a bad review on Google. Why push customers away?

I have been golfing for years (I like the pain I guess). Golf is hurting money wise because: too hard, too $$ and too long to play. My 3 year old son wanted to putt this summer, so I brought him to a local course with 3 practice greens. We stayed away from everyone and took extra care to make sure not to get wild. He was doing great and a staff guy came out and said he can't be there, a golf course is no place for kids. I was bummed and said " I know this course is losing money (city course) and we were being very respectful. Why would you push away someone who was interested in playing? " Never been back....

[DaYooper]

For better or worse, most homebrew shops are started by people who have a passion for homebrewing. The good thing is you have people who know what they are talking about in most cases, and tend to hire like minded people to staff the counter. When I go to Adventures I always leave with something new learned, and I like to think from time to time I feed them some good information as well.

The bad thing is that these people are usually not business people and make some stupid decisions. Adventures for the most part has good prices, but I think they mark everything up a set amount and not by market prices. This means I go elsewhere to get my StarSan which is way expensive at their store, and with flat rate shipping being somewhat of the norm, I tend to order a kit or something else at the same time. Not being business people (or lacking common sense), many follow the way of a good chunk of Homebrew Talk and slam anyone who makes extracts especially something like MrB. I dont know if they do that to sell more stuff or if they are just stupid, arrogant, and/or asshats. But they certainly dont get my business.

[Kealia]

Welcome back into the brew fold. And who doesn't like Moose Drool? That's a nice way to come back.

[sgtpeppr56]

Thanks, good to be back!

The lbk had action for 36 hours now its all calm. So far so good!

I didn't take a hydrometer sample, my sample tube is broken. Do I wait 2 to 3 weeks and bottle it up? That was my first thought.

[mashani]

The easy answer is 3 weeks is safe, but my more fun answer is:

What yeast did you use and how much? If you used Windsor and threw the whole pack in a 2 to 2.5 gallon batch then it's probably going to be done in one week really - so 2 weeks should be cleaned up and quite safe to bottle. I've had some stuff actually hit final gravity in 4-5 days when pitching that much yeast and could have bottled them at 7-10 days if I wanted to. So I've been bottling almost everything that is a true ale in 2 weeks these days, just to keep a weekly rotation schedule. And I'm one of those that used to always wait 3 when using the LBKs. (although that was more to keep a schedule too).