Batches · Šiauliai
Twenty litres, one hob, and a cellar that runs a month behind the weather.
A home brewer's log from Šiauliai: small-batch ales and farmhouse beers, barley from the west, garage hops, cellar temperatures, and the batches that failed.
- Kettle
- 30 L
- Into the fermenter
- 20 L
- Cellar
- 2 m down
- Brewing since
- 2021
- Standing in
- Šiauliai County, Lithuania
Cellar strip
What the cellar does over a year
One reading off the same thermometer on the same wall, every Sunday since the autumn of 2021. The concrete lags the weather above ground by about a month, which is why the warmest fortnight down here lands in the second half of August.
The ledger
Gravities are read with a hydrometer at twenty degrees and written on the card before the kettle gets washed. Volumes are what went into the fermenter, not what came out of the bottling bucket.
| No. | Brewed | Batch | Gravity, 1.000 — 1.060 | ABV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 05 | 14 Jun 202615 °C cellar | Bottling day: priming, patience and the neighbours How a bottling afternoon actually runs, why the priming sugar gets weighed rather than scooped, and what happens when the bag goes up the stairs on a Friday. Bottling · 6 min · 4 parts | 1.040 → 1.008 | 4.2 % |
| 04 | 9 Nov 202511 °C cellar | Four batches that went wrong, and what each one cost An infection, a stuck sparge, a stalled ferment and a crate of gushing bottles: the four failures that changed how this kitchen brews, written out in full. Faults · 9 min · 4 parts | 1.052 → 1.010 | 5.5 % |
| 03 | 30 Mar 20258 °C cellar | Fermenting to cellar temperature instead of a thermostat The cellar under the garage runs from eight degrees in February to eighteen in August. Matching the beer to the month beats fighting the season with a fridge. Fermentation · 7 min · 4 parts | 1.044 → 1.010 | 4.5 % |
| 02 | 13 Oct 202414 °C cellar | Barley from forty minutes west, hops behind the garage Where the grain and hops in these batches come from: a farm out towards Žemaitija, two bines on a wire, and what local ingredients cost you in consistency. Ingredients · 8 min · 4 parts | 1.048 → 1.008 | 5.3 % |
| 01 | 21 Apr 202411 °C cellar | A brew day in a kitchen with one working hob How a twenty-litre brew day actually runs in a small flat: kettle headroom, what the hob can and cannot do, and where the mash quietly loses heat. Brew day · 7 min · 4 parts | 1.044 → 1.010 | 4.5 % |
Standing orders
Four lines taped inside the cupboard door
I brew twenty litres at a time in a kitchen on the northern edge of Šiauliai and ferment it in a cellar under the garage. Every batch is written down — gravity, temperature, timing, result — so the good ones can be repeated and the bad ones are not repeated by accident.
- 01Write the numbers down before you clean the kettle.
- 02A batch you cannot repeat has taught you nothing.
- 03Taste at every stage; the fault is almost always early.
- 04Keep the failed batches in the log, in full.