Fat Boy Deluxe

Last week was mostly spent getting ready for the weekend.  The Worts recently purchased a rum barrel from Newport Storm, a brewery in RI, who also happens to distill and makes Thomas Tew rum.  The rum barrel was originally used to age Tennessee whiskey.  The plan was for the Worts to get together for a day and brew 60 gallons of Strong Scotch Ale, aka Wee Heavy.  I volunteered my basement to keep the barrel for the year it will be aging the beer, which means everybody would be coming over to our house for the brewing – Kristin was thrilled with this, ha!

In addition to hosting, I took on getting the ingredients for the massive grain bill since I’ve recently started doing bulk grain buys for the club.  The clubs order came to 21 sacks of grain.  The grain arrived on a pallet to my work (amazing what a little beer bribe can get your shipping department to allow).  Next was loading all that grain into the Subaru to get it back to the house.  This was the challenge:

Grain to be loaded

Surprisingly, it didn’t take too long to get it all in the wagon, only about 30ish minutes.  The shipping department had the truck delivery guy drop right in the parking lot, so I wouldn’t have to carry it off the loading dock and could load it directly into the wagon.  The tough part would come later…

Lowriding

So now I know, 21 sacks is pretty much the limit of a Subaru Outback…in case anybody was wondering.  Once home, the rain really picked up, so I put off the inevitable until 10:00 PM that night.  At that point I grabbed the rain jacket and headed out into the dark wet driveway.  Opening up the back, I was greeted with this:

Ready to unload

An hour later, all 21 bags were safely down in the basement.  Check done!  Just a quick shower and then it was time for bed.

The hops proved to be a little daunting.  If you brew beer at all, then you know there is/was a hop shortage.  This can make something like buying 2 pounds of hops a little difficult.  Luckily there is Fresh Hops, who just so happens to have a 2 pound limit per type of hop.  Ordered on Monday, shipped on Tuesday, hope like hell it actually shows up on Friday.  Friday evening, about 5:00 PM, I get the message from Kristin…the hops have landed!  Buster was psyched!

Mmm...Buster approved!

2 pounds of Goldings delivered, not to mention a bunch of others!

Box o' hops!

Now the only thing left was to make sure the house was in order, but it would have to wait until Saturday.