Kettle To Keg - News

Hoppy Holidays!

2009-12-23T09:32:27-05:00

To what did my wondering eyes did appear…we’ve sold out of supplies to make great beer! In a Kettle to Keg first, this Holiday Season kicked the recession’s butt, and we have sold out of stock. A new shipment will be arriving on or around December 30, 2009 so make sure to stop back and start your New Year off right! If you can’t wait until then, check out our new vendors at Barb’s Beer Emporium in Concord, NH or I Like That is Portsmouth, NH where you can now find custom K2K beer kits and t-shirts.

Thank you to all of our loyal customers who helped us meet this exciting, while slightly inconvenient, milestone! Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Cheers,

K2K Brew Crew

K2K Goes to College

2009-11-11T10:28:55-05:00

Move over Harvard and Yale…the College of Beer is about to open its virtual doors! You may have heard the buzz around the shop for some time now. Well, we would like to announce that the College of Beer website is up and running, a collaborative effort amongst like minded beer geeks from K2K and BeerMath.com . Currently on the site, you will find an “admissions application” (the admissions fee waived for YOU of course). Sign up today to receive emails notifying you when a new syllabus is posted and classes are available. All classes will be brought to you in video format, and we will begin filming at beer stores and breweries around the East Coast this week…until eventually we conquer the world! In order to make time for filming, K2K will be closed on Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. However, we have extended our hours for the beer brewing season to include 9-7 on Saturdays. So join us at ;College of Beer Where no brewer is left behind!

Bier de Garde Kit

2009-08-01T16:38:11-04:00

Here at Kettle to Keg we are always working to improve our offerings for our customers. We are currently (as I write this, in fact) brewing up a Bier de Garde with the intent of turning it into a kit. This beer is a French farmhouse ale with a malty base, low bitterness, and strong spicy and floral character imparted by the yeast. We will, of course, be brewing it several more times in order to perfect the recipe before it is released to the public. Its a tough job brewing and drinking so much delicious homebrew, but someone has to do it!

Raspberry Blonde Ale

2009-06-27T13:25:30-04:00

Summertime is a great time for experimenting with adding fruit to beer. I know what you are thinking, but fruit beers don’t have to be super-sweet, cloying, or thick with artificial flavors. Two weeks ago I brewed one of our EZY Blonde Ale kits and then added five and a quarter pounds of raspberries to the five gallons of beer. I let the kit ferment normally for one week then transferred it to a secondary and added the raspberries. After a week of sitting on the raspberries for a week, the beer was bottled and my preliminary report is that it tastes fantastic!

My process for adding fruit was to buy seven twelve ounce bags of frozen raspberries from the grocery store, let them thaw to room temperature, and then pureed them in the blender. I then boiled the fruit in order to sterilize all of it and kill any wild bacteria and yeast that might be on the raspberries. Some people dislike this method since it can set the natural pectin that is in fruit and cause the beer to be cloudy, but I don’t really care. After cooling the fruit it was added to the beer which had been racked into a secondary carboy. Carbonation started in about six minutes and seemed to be done within two days. We left it on the fruit for a week, however, in order to extract as much fruit flavor as we could and to allow the raspberry solids to fall to the bottom of the carboy.

When bottling we tasted the near final product and agreed that it was amazing. The beer is a dark pink color, much like ruby-red grapefruit juice. The taste is intensely raspberry, but very dry. There is virtually no residual sweetness since our final gravity ended up at 1.008. While there is a little bit of the blonde coming trhough, it is almost all raspberries. I can’t wait for the final product once it is carbonated. Plans are already in the works to brew ten more gallons of this delicious nectar so that my buddy and I will have enough to last through the summer!

Time For Summer Wines!

2009-06-08T23:35:01-04:00

Hey there homebrewers!

Have you ever thought about making wine in addition to beer? Summer is a great time to get into winemaking, especially if you are busy with other activities. Wine is less time-intensive than beer, requiring less than thirty minutes to get started! If you have an extra carboy or bucket sitting around, why not fill it with wine? We have dozens of different winekits in our shop and each one will be ready in just four weeks. Each winekit comes complete with everything needed to make six gallons of wine, enough for thirty bottles!

If you are more adventurous, K2K stocks everything needed for the home winemaker to create your own fruit or vegetable wine. Just about any fruit grown at home or at a pick-your-own farm can be used to make wine. Raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, rhubarb, dandelions, apples, plums, cherries, apricots, peaches, and many others can all be used to make delicious fruit wines. More exotic ingredients such as gooseberries, mulberries, cranberries, huckleberries, onions, mushrooms, pineapple, rosebuds, beets, carrots, clover, corn, peas, potatoes, ginger, and even sage, parsley, and garlic can be used. Basically, if it grows, it can be turned into wine. The helpful staff here can help you turn virtually anything in you garden into a delicious wine. If you have a small amount of fruit or vergetables, we can formulate a one to three gallon batch that will still give you the wonderful flavors you are looking for.

So if you're looking for something to do with that carboy or bucket that is collecting dust during the summer, come visit us at K2K and we'll help you fill it with wine!

In 5 Minutes we added the grape juice and put in the yeast. Now we have a filled carboy and soon 30 bottles of wine! All for $71.99

A trick we do here at K2K is cut the corner of the juice bag this way we can add the juice and all the O2 the yeast needs.

Posted via web from kettletokeg's posterous