inahandbasket

This needs more press!
A documentary about the current beer war in America where the craft brewers are trying to gain ground from the big breweries in a relatively static overall marketplace.

Not really news to most of the people reading this I'd wager, but it looks like a labor of love and includes pretty much all of the big names of craft brewing. In the trailer I saw Sam Caligione of Dogfish Head, Jim K. of Sam Adams, Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery (and beer+food god), Greg Koch (I think) of Stone brewing, and many others all chiming in with their thoughts.

Get word out! The producer is trying to do all the marketing herself rather than through a studio, and needs all the word of mouth she can get.

mmmmmm wow.
So I racked the Belgian-style tripple into secondary last night, and stole a sip while I was there.
If that taste was anything to go on, this beer recipe is going to be engraved in metal and mounted on my wall for posterity. Holy crap is it tasty! I really can't wait to get this batch bottled so that I can start drinking it! I'll probably have to brew another batch of it shortly thereafter because this one ain't gonna hang around long.

I hope we can manage to save a few bottles to see how it ages.

hmm. I need a good beer-post icon.

so I WAS going to bed a half hour ago.

Earlier tonight I came home from dinner with a friend to discover the lid of my fermenter literally blown halfway off the bucket. That was with 1.5 gallons of headspace! it's 5 gallons in a 6.5 gal bucket! I had an airlock pop out once before, but this is the first time I've had a lid popped open. Those lids go on VERY tight.

The fermentation seemed to have chilled out a bit, so I cleaned up the lid and the bucket rim, rinsed the yeast out of the airlock, sanitized everything, and put it all back together thinking that the worst was over.
Watched the Daily show, the Colbert Report, and then we were packin it in for bed. I stuck my head in the closet to make sure everything was ok, and what do I find! The freakin airlock is filled again, and tilting precariously out of the hole in the lid that it's supposed to be firmly in.
Oh well, sleep is overrated.
Clean the airlock out again, install a blow-off tube for the second time ever, and I've been keeping an eye on it for 10 minutes now.
Seems like it'll make it through the night without destroying my closet, so I'm off to bed.

I guess this is is what I get for brewing a ~1.080 OG beer for the first time.

Beer geekery:

Brewed up a Belgian Trippel style beer yesterday morning. It finally started fermenting by this morning, we were worried about it for awhile there. It's bubbling along merrily now, or at least it was when I left this morning and so should still be. I'm really looking forward to drinking this one.

Bought out a local store of the last bottles of Unibrue's "Edition 2004" which we'd dispaired of finding any remaining bottles of about a year ago. They had three bottles left, so we bought them all, drank the one we'd been saving, and still have 3 hanging around for future events. This is probably the best beer I've ever found. We also got an "Edition 2005" to try and see if it compares to the '04. It didn't a year ago, but it was really young then, so maybe by now it'll be better.

Brewed another gallon of ginger ale last week, but it didn't start fermenting for some reason and now has mold on top.
BUMMER!
Got ingredients so that we can try that again. This time I'll make a yeast starter I think.

( Belgian tripple recipe )

Beer:

Pumpkin beer turned out ok, a little hoppier than we wanted (damned hop plug sludge), but still rather tasty. Give it until the end of the month in the bottle and it should be quite tasty.

But the porter that we just put into secondary...
oh my.
That's going to be one remarkably tasty beer.
*happy sigh*

Ok, so I'm headed to a music festival in just over 2 weeks.
I was going to take some of my backstock of homebrew, but apparently they're pretty anal about not bringing glass onto the grounds, as it's a horse pasture the rest of the year and horses + glass bottles = bad.
I haven't kegged before, but I think that the only way I'm going to get a beer to this event is to do some form of CO2 kegging.
Thus, this plea for advice.

Corny kegs are too big for me to deal with, so I need an alternate option.
Two options I can see, would like some advice. They're both about the same price for a full setup, so that's not much of an issue.

Options:
4x 5L. party kegs: link
small quantites good for general kegging, don't have to drink a whole damn batch in 1-2 goes. cons?

2x 2.25gal party pigs: link
Need to be primed with sugar, not sure if you can CO2 carbonate. Can someone shed some light on this? If this is the case, my only option is the party kegs.


ALSO!
I need a recipe that'll be ready to drink in about 2 weeks and 2 days.
HELP!!!