Today I finally got around to kegging batches 31 and 32. Things were uneventful, and despite my reservations about having left them in the primary for 77 and 51 days, respectively, they both appear to have turned out OK. Mediterranean Baltic finished up at 1.014 for 7.6% ABV and Mulligan IPA finished at 1.007 for 5.1%, my lowest-ABV IPA but completely within parameters.
Early tastings indicate Mediterranean Baltic will be an incredibly smooth and nicely chocolatey brew when it is conditioned. It's a got a bit of a bitter bite at the end but I think it's pretty successful. Mulligan IPA is nicely citrusy with plenty of back-end bitterness, and it seems like my cara-pils experiment to add a little body has paid off.
So, for Christmas, Emily got me a refractometer which I tried out tonight in addition to taking hydrometer readings. The 1.014 porter shows 9 Brix, and the 1.007 IPA showed 5.5 Brix. This is because the index of refraction is affected by both sugars and alcohol in a different way than is the density; it turns out there are a bunch of cool formulae dealing with this, and I look forward to learning them all!
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