I could Cry Havoc all night long!

So that little Cry Havoc starter got built up into a 1 liter starter and went into a 1.084 Imperial Oatmeal Stout.  Boy it is nice when you have a good starter.  There was obvious fermentation going on within an hour or to of pitching that yeast.  Good thing I have a blow-off tube!  Too bad the bow-off bucket I used was too small!

Anyway, I've been really happy with the Cry Havoc yeast.  I fermented this beer in my basement where the temp has been around 65 or 66 F and it brought this beer down to 1.020 in 3 or 4 days!  I was hoping to get the gravity a little lower but my mash ended up being pretty warm and there are a lot of oats in this beer.  Regardless this little guy gave me an apparent attenuation of 74% which is pretty good considering it is only rated to 70%.

This coming weekend the SouthCoast Homebrewers Association is planning a Belgian Partigyle.  It's a bit of an experiment for the group.  This isn't really a traditional partigyle but a sort of hybrid where we are using to mash tuns.  One will produce a wort for a Quad, the second will produce a wort for a Tripell, and the second runnings from both systems will be combined to try and make a Dubell..  On paper it works, we'll see what happens once the yeast is pitched.

I'm breaking out my trusty culture of WLP 550 Belgian Ale for one beer and we have a new addition to the stable, Wyeast 3787 Trappist High Gravity.  I'm really excited about this one too!  We will be using it in two of the beers.

Right now I only have one stir plate so the Trappist yeast is getting a stir and the Belgian Ale is building up old school.  Interestingly, I do have a second stirplate stashed away.  A couple of years ago I decided to build my own with a computer fan and rare earth magnets.  It was a fun project and everything looked great but I was never able to get the stir bar I had at the time to couple well with the magnets and actually stir.  Since I got my new stir plate and stir bar I finally figured out what the problem was....the original stir bar that I had was not magnetized!  It is just a plastic coated piece of metal.  It sticks to the stir plate but even on my new stir plate doesn't make a strong enough magnetic coupling to stir.

Well that stir bar is going straight into the trash (as soon as I fish it out of the bottom of the WLP 550 starter)!  I have a new magnetized stirbar on the way.  Now I just need to fish out the homemade stirplate, re-solder some of the connections that have become broken as I have fiddled with it, and I will be all set to have 2 starters stirring concurrently!  YeeeHaaawww!