Brewin' in P-Town

I've been brewing for a few years now. So far, results have been marginal... I've been doing extract batches mostly, and have lost a few due to infection or fermentation temperature problems.

I live in Portland, Mi, just moved into a little duplex with my first basement which stays nice and cool, great for fermenting. The city water sucks though, so I have to buy bottled spring water.

I just recently built a mash tun, so I can now do all-grain batches. This is me doing my very first all-grain batch on my own, an American Brown Ale. The mash tun uses the steel braid from the outside of a toilet water supply hose for a "manifold," to filter the grain from the wort. That braid is clamped to a short copper pipe stuck through a rubber stopper with a piece of vinyl tube. Simple and easy, and only good for doing batch sparges, not that doing batch sparge is limiting, more info here.

I boil on a fairly cheap turkey fryer that I picked up off Ebay. It's a 7.5 gallon aluminum pot with a 50,000 btu or somethin' burner. I could really use a stainless steel pot and and a hotter burner. Maybe something like this, but then I would need something like this to heat it. Oh well, one day.

I'm not much of the creative type, so this is going to be a straight log of my brewings and related activities. I'll start tomorrow when I post a log of my first all grain brew, that Brown Ale I mentioned earlier. Man it could really use a name... I live close to the Grand River, which is always muddy brown, could be something with that.