The Harvest

So its time to harvest our hops from our mystery plant that was here when we bought the house. We don't do anything to it, we don't water it, train it, put twine up or anything else. It just goes crazy and it's an absolute monster. I can't get to all the hops cause the vines extend twenty feet into three different neighbors yard but we still got a lot of them.



The picture is what we pulled off the vine today but if you can see that mound of vines on the ground there are still a lot more to be picked off and dried. We'll start vacuum sealing them tomorrow. I'm excited to see how much we get.

Jockey Box

So we are going camping this weekend, and Randy and I had brewed 50 gallons of beer over the 4th of July weekend for the camping trip. He has a small jockey box with one tap on it. We need more than that for camping so I decided to go ahead and make something so we can have more taps rolling cold. Here it is-









First inventoried supplies. The cooler, 50 feet of 1/4 copper tube, silicone caulking, taps, something to wrap the copper around (in this case a small propane tank) and of course Beer.



















Wrapped the copper tightly around the tank.





































Copper all wound up.











































Checked to see see if I would be able to fit 2 or 3 coils. In this case only 2 will fit.



























Counted the coils and divided in half. Used this number to mark the center point and cut the copper. Here it is cut.

































The two coils inside the cooler.

































Drilled 1/4 inch holes and brought 1 inch of each coil through the holes and sealed them on both sides with caulking.

























Installed the 2 taps, and hooked up beer lines from the copper to the taps.



Now just need to add beer, ice, some camping and some friends.