Sat Jul 11, 2009 6:43 pm
I have around 20 kegs or so, a bunch of carboys mostly storing meads at the moment, and a lot of stuff in archival in various forms (traditional glass bottles, 2L and 1L pop bottles, etc.). When I need a keg, I'll bottle off whatever is in it, or put it in however many 2L bottles I need. It's a stash. Whatever holds liquid and keeps air out. All stuck in my walk-in, lagering freezer, various closets and whatever other random locations I can put them until SWMBO complains too much.
Not all my beers came out of kegs. Some were already in bottles. Some were created from blends of other beers. None of the meads came from kegs. You only need one bottle to enter the first round, so it's pretty easy to scrounge up a lot of different beers. Some of the beers I entered were 7 or 8 years old. I don't enter many competitions any more, so when I put stuff in competition archival, it tends to hang out for awhile. I did blow out of several beers in this last go round.
I didn't know I was using the Tasty method until he described it on the show; I got it from Joe Formanek several years ago. About the only difference I think is that he uses a hose of some sort and fills the bottles from the bottom. I just sort of poured them in. But I think his method sounds a little easier and should result in less waste, so I'll probably steal that soon.
One thing I didn't mention on the show, but should have because it would have made me seem more like a brewcaster, is that I was out of work for about three months at the start of the year. And knew it was coming two months before that. So I had a lot of free time on my hands that I used to brew a bunch of entries. I used one whole week of unemployment pay for NHC entry fees.
2011-2012
