Double Batch Day. Biere De Garde & Imperial IPA

So I started my brew day Saturday night. I was doing some reading on the White Labs website about their Yeast. Which I'm sure many of you dont know White Labs(from Hood River) is the company who produces of the yeast we use currently to ferment our beer. They suggest you create a yeast starter for any beer with an Original Gravity over 1.060. They suggest this for a faster and healthier fermentation of your beer, so that you get the best tasting finished product and a full fermentation.  This starter is supposed to give the yeast enough sugar to reproduce and make more yeast cells to handle a beer with an Original Gravity over 1.060. Both the beers I brewed today had an O.G. of 1.078 and 1.076. Sorry for the long winded explanation but I hope it helps if you know nothing about brewing beer or yeast. If you are confused please leave a comment and we will answer your questions to the best of out abilities. With that said. More pictures!

Here are all my supplies needed for the brew day. About 30 pounds of grains in the bucket and the bag behind it. 

 Here is a photo of our Hot Liquor being heated. Hot Liquor is really just water being heated to add to our Mash Tun for the extraction of sugars from the grains we add.

I was brewing most of the day by myself which was nice accept for the fact that I didn't take as many photos as I wanted to. Here is the Hot Liquor draining into our Mash Tun to preheat the mash tun to a specific temperature. I add 10 Gallons of Hot Liquor then after about 10 minutes I drain the water out to get my mash volume.

Here is my sidekick for part of the day. Kevin The Dog working really hard. He's a trooper. 

 I brewed the Imperial IPA first and man did it have a lot of hop additions. I ended up using 7 ounces of hops. The majority of the hops being Magnum hops which have and Alpha Acid percentage of 20.5% which if you dont know is really big. Making for a bitterly great beer. 

It ended up being a really long day of brewing for me especially since I'm recovering from a really gnarly cold... Things didn't quite go as I had planned. I ended up short on the Original Gravities for both of my beers. I think this is because I didn't achieve the boil off I had planned even though I had a very rigorous boil going for each hour long boil. As my Dad would say "I was close enough for horse shoes and hand grenades." Which is ok with me. After all I have to remind myself not to be too hard on myself first of all. And secondly I'm brewing beer for fun in a garage! Couldn't be any better. I plan to enter both of these beers when they are finished in a couple competitions that are coming up this spring. Hopefully I will get some good feed back from the judges and make adjustments to my process and recipes for the future. Cheers and don't forget to ask questions and add comments for feedback on the posts.