Regal Reedy Home Brew is Jo and Mike Nencetti
We will be documenting our home brews on this page.
We currently buy our brewing kits from Alternative Beverage in Belmont NC – we are also trying beer kits from Northern Brewer and Brewers Best.
Twisted Degenerate – DIPA – Heady Topper Clone Brewed February 11th 2020
Lucky Red Jolly – Irish Red Ale Brewed March 19th 2020
No Name Yet – American Pale Ale Brewed April 20th 2020
Dark Daze – Porter Brewed May 19th 2020
Freedom – Session IPA Brewed June 19th 2020
Tiny 1 gallon IPA kit Brewed July 8th 2020
11 AKA “Turn it up to 11” IPA – Brewed July 11th 2020
Maddog2020 – American Pale with Skullcap Brewed August 16th 2020
Elder Beer – Zombie Dirt Pale Ale – 1 gal kit with Elderberries.
Coffee Porter – Brewed Sept 25th 2020 – Notorious RGB (Really Good Beer)
Feeling Blue – Pale Ale with Juniper Berries – Brewed November 4th 2020
Hemp-Ale – Pale Ale with Hemp – Brewed Nov 30th 2020
Holidaze are meant for Spices – Dry Stout – Brewed Dec 24th, 2020
Twisted Degenerate 2 – Heady Topper Clone. Brewed Jan 9th 2021
Coconut Porter – I Need Samoa Love – Brewed January 31st 2021.
<< Kitchen renovations March-April, June ’21 halted Regal Reedy Home Brew production>>
Bitter – Brewed April 24th 2021 – Will rename when we think up something clever. (we never did)
Golden Ale – Brewed July 12th 2021. Jo added 1/4th oz of hemp to the last 2 min of the boil.
2022 update. Rather than create individual pages. I will summarize this years beers below. We do add some of these to Untappd. So technically someone could visit our home, check in to Regal Reedy Home Brew and review one of our kegged beers.
Smash – Brewed October 6th 2021. Single Malt and Single Hop (Cahsmere). Our first with Omega yeast. This beer started out sweet and malty. by December it is sweet, malty and bitter. Very simple beer. good for beginners. We were going to add hemp but were too busy. No need to put on a web page.
English IPA with Hemp – Brewed December 19th 2021. Jo added hemp to the last 2 min of the boil. Dec 29th Jo added 1/2 oz hemp (from Green Life Family Farms) The hemp made the OG higher than expected. I think this is our first time using Fuggle hops. – OG 1.082 FG 1.016 – Early taste is very malty, not much hope aroma, slight hemp flavor. This beer is best drank at the end of the day. It causes drowsiness, and vivid dreams.
Coconut Porter – This will be our second porter using the same High Sierra Porter kit from Alternative Beverage. Our first using a TILT2 Bluetooth digital hydrometer.
Brewed 1/17/2022 OG 1.060 – Moved to secondary 1/29 at 1.017.
The secondary is a Corny keg with 16oz of toasted coconut in a mesh bag. The mesh bag of coconut is tied to a monofilament string. This pairs well with a samosa cookie.
Rye Pale Ale Our first beer brewed with rye, I think. Cascade, Citra and Amarillo hops.
Brewed March 21st. OG 1.054 with the Tilt2. We did not use the hydrometer. Fermentation with Dry English Ale Yeast, (WLP007) took 24 hours to become very active.
Colner Hofbrau Kolsch – Brewed 7/9/2022 – Hersbrucker bittering and aromatic hops. White Labs WLP029 Kolsch Yeast. Jo added elder flowers and yarrow to the last 2 minutes of the boil. We were concerned as this yeast needs a cooler fermenting temperature. 60-72F. as of 7/10 it is fermenting fine at 74F. OG from the Tilt2 is 1.047. 7/22 kegged with a FG of 1.014. 7/27. Jo says it has a farmhouse quality. i’ll give a week or so to maturt. 8/12/2022 – beer has a Belgium style aroma, that has improved over the past few weeks.
Best Buds – Golden Ale with local hops and hemp – Brewed 9/3/2022 Local cascade hops from the hop farm, Blue Meringue hemp from Green Life Family Farm added to the last two minutes of the boil 0.25oz. On September 19th after fermentation Jo added 0.40oz – OG 1.045 FG 1.007 ABV 4.86% Kegged 10/3/2022 – Tapped 10/8. Needs more CO2 and flavor aging.
Dia De Los Muertos Stout – Brewed 11/2/2022. Chinook and Cascade hops. WLP001 liquid yeast. Jo added a bag of ancho dried peppers, 1 cinnamon stick, coffee beans, vanilla bean pod, cacao nibs, damiana leaf to the last two minutes of the boil, and during cooldown. OG 1.053. FG1.014 . ABV 5.12%. DOD is Day of the Dead. I thought we cooled the wort to 72f, but it was actually 80f. oops. Yeast did not care. Very active 11/3. I think the damiana is the dominant flavor.
Bitter Love – American Red Bitter – Brewed Jan 21st 2023 – Light DME – Zythos (bittering) and DE Tettnang (aromatic) hops. Jo added 1 cup of St John’s Wort to the last 2 min of the boil and left it in for a while during cool down. OG 1.054. No issues cooling down to 72 for fermentation. WLP051 yeast was 1 month past expiration. It took longer than usual to get active fermentation. In 3 years we have never had an issue with White Labs liquid yeast. Final Gravity of 1.013 on 2/5/2023
Ctrl-Alt-Del (Did you try turning it off and on?) German Altbier – De Hallertauer Hops. WLP036(almost at the expiration date). Brewed April 25th 2023 – OG 1.047 – FG 1.008 – Jo added Spicebush Berries and Elderflowers. Kegged May 8th 2023. We did not need the copper wort chiller, as we put the 2.5 or so gallons of wort in the ice filled sink, and then had dinner. After dinner we added the rest of the water. The temp was around 68 for fermentation. Why did we not think of this earlier. Apparently we have brains we have not used yet.
Tadcaster Ordinary Bitter – June 19th 2023. Jo replaced UK Challenger hops with 1 oz of local Nugget hops, that she helped grow at the Hop Farm at Lomax farms in Cabarrus Co. She added 1oz of home grown elderflower to the last 2 minutes of the boil. UK East Kent aromatic hops. Instead of WLP005, we used WLP036 yeast. AltBev was out of 005. The Best by is 5/13 we will find out soon if it still any good. OG 1.036. This beer will not be strong. Once again no issues cooling the beer down to 72 for fermentation. No need for a wort chiller. This beer kicked in September. The flavor profile at the end was very unique, almost like an herbal carbonated tea,
Best Buds 2023 – NCHI entry. Brewed September 9th 2023. Jo will be entering this beer next month at the North Carolina Homebrewing Invitational at Greenlife Family Farms in Concord NC. This is a High Sierra Pale Ale kit. Jo replaced the pellet Cascade hops with 1 oz each of locally grown and dried Chinook and Cascade hope from Lomax Research and Education Farm. Yes Jo grew the hops for her beer. She also added help grown at Greenlife Family Farm to the last 2 min of the boil. o.g was 1.049 Final gravity was 1.008. So it should be around 5.38%. Fermentation was one of the most active we have ever seen. We kegged the beer September 22nd. Jo added hemp in a bag held by fishing line. So yes she is dry-hemping her beer for 4 days. The competition is October 21st.
Burn Out Stout. – Brewed 12/26/2023 – We had a beer from Burial called Rust on tap. So we named the beer Burn Out Stout. Contains damiana, cacao, vanilla. cinnamon, coffee and hot peppers. OG1.053 FG 1.017 5.64%
We use this site to calculate how strong our beer is https://www.brewersfriend.com/abv-calculator/
Below are some screen shots and notes from our 3 years of home brewing, amidst a kitchen remodel.
Kitchen Brewing – Jo uses a spaghetti strainer for preparing the specialty grains. This keeps the nylon bag from getting burned. Not shown here – we sparge (pour water over) the specialty grain bag into the kettle. We brew using a ceramic (glass top) stove.
We upgraded our sink so we could cool the wort faster. The kettle would not fit properly in the dual basin sink. We usually spend 15 minutes reducing the temperature to the upper 70’s. Update. we no longer need the wort chiller.. we hold off adding 3 gallons of water, and leave the 2 gallons in the sink filled with water and ice for 20 min. (basically take a break) Much less work to reduce the temperature to the low 70’s.
Homebrew kits come with a simple air lock pictured above. Your beer will be all over the floor, ceiling and walls the morning after you brew a 5 gallon porter, and only use an airlock . Jo bought a tube from Lowes. We connected it to a plastic bottle with 2 airholes and Starsan. After a week you can try using a simple airlock. This is a 1 inch clear vinyl tubing. Five feet long.
in January of 2022 we bought a TILT2 Hydrometer for our Coconut Porter. Simple to use. Works with Bluetooth to give you gravity readings to your cell phone, and upload them to a web site.
We filter our beer twice. The first is from kettle to primary fermenter. The second is when kegging. If we transfer to secondary, then we filter a third time. We do not want our keg to get clogged with trub. It has not happened yet. If we brew more than 5.5 gallons, we put the remainder in flip top glass bottles with priming sugar tablets. Do not use clear flip tops. We used to bottle, in 2020.
Reedy, is our Australian Cattle Dog. He is a rescue.. He likes to sit with his legs crossed. That is how we came up with the name “Regal Reedy” He likes to go for hikes at Reedy Creek Nature Preserve.
We think Reedy was born in 2014. He was 1 day away from being put down, in a shelter in Rome GA.
Here is a link to his PetFinder Bio
Jo wanted to use the spent grains of the pale ale, so she made Reedy Treats
Our Kegerator. an Edgestar KC2000TWINA. We needed adapters for the Cornelius keg we will be using. We also use this like a mini fridge, storing beer we bottle condition, or beer from local breweries..
We have been successful with using 10psi
Check Valves look like packing material. They are crucial to preventing CO2 from leaking. We learned the hard way, and lost out first C02 container within 2 days. Then we added these valves where they belong – where the CO2 line connects to the Coupler, opened the line, and did a soapy water test, to see if any gas was escaping.