Holy Crap! That's good!

I took a hydrometer reading of my Imperial Stout today. Activity had slowed down quite a bit and I wasn't seeing much action. I was afraid that with a beer this big that I had a stuck fermentation, I didn't think that I could fully ferment out a 1.081 beer that fast.

Well, I was wrong. The reading had me right at 1.021 for an apparent attenuation of 74%, the yeast I used is estimated at 69-73% so I'm already well above that. I snagged a small taste of it, I made sure it was a small taste because I was doing this on my lunch break and it is 8% alcohol by volume. Wow is it good! Perhaps a bit bitter, but that should mellow out in time.

I'm going to let this sit another week in the primary and then it's off to a secondary for 2 or 3 months. Only then will it go to bottles. I have plenty of beer sitting around anyway. I have about 150 bottles of homebrew at the moment and another 5 gallons that can be bottled next week (good for 50 more bottles).

Imperial Stout

Last Saturday I brewed my 2nd to last extract brew. An Imperial Stout that I got from Northern Brewer.

Here is the run-down of the recipe:

• 0.5 lbs Roasted Barley
• 0.5 lbs Black Malt
• 0.5 lbs Chocolate Malt
  
• 12 lbs Amber Malt Syrup
  
• 1 oz Galena (60 min)
• 1 oz Fuggles (45 min)
• 1 oz Willamette (10 min)
  
• Wyeast #1728 Scottish Ale Yeast
  

A few days before brewday I took the yeast out of the fridge and made a 1 liter starter with it. To make the starter I just took a cup of dry malt extract and added it to 900 ml of boiling water. I let it boil for about 15 minutes and then crash cooled it in the sink. I pitched the yeast in when the temp had fallen to 70 degrees and let it ferment out for a few days. I ended up with a nice slurry of yeast on the bottom of the flask and some really bad mini-beer.




Next I had to deal with the grains. I had a pound and a half of grains that needed to be crushed. In prior brews I had put the steeping grains in a zip-lock back and attempted to crush them with a rolling pin. It worked, kind of. Now I have my lovely barley crusher, so I used that to crush the grains.

After crushing, the grains had a nice coffee like aroma to them. They also turned everything they touched black. Since I'm looking to gain color from them, that's a good thing. The dog was disappointed though. On the last brew, I used honey malt for flavor and the dog acted like it was candy. She loved it. She took one sniff of these and turned up her nose. No accounting for taste I guess.

With all my prep work done, it was time to start making the beer. I do all my brewing out on the back porch with a patio burner. I used to use filtered water from the fridge in the kitchen, but I'm lazy and that took too long. For the last couple of brews I've been using tap water from the faucet out back. I use a food grade hose, so the water doesn't taste like rubber and I haven't seen any detrimental affects from the tap water.

I add about 7 gallons of water to the pot in the hope that I will end up with 5-5.5 gallons. I start the flame and start waiting. When adjusted properly the burner will get 7 gallons of water to a boil in about 30 minutes. Today, I had the flame too low and had to adjust it after 20 minutes. Once I did that things started moving along. While that was happening, I retired to the kitchen and put a quart and a half of water on the stove. I let that warm up to 165 degrees, then removed it from the stove, added the steeping grains, covered, and then placed it in a tent made of towels to keep the heat in. I let that sit for 30 minutes. Once that was done, I added it to my now boiling water outside.

Now it's time to start adding ingredients. I have everything out and ready.

The extract:

The hops:

I add the malt extract to the boiling water. Slowly. malt extract is thick, it has a molasses like consistency and takes quite a while to get out of the jugs. Once the majority of it is out of the jug, I add some of the hot water and give it a good shake. That helps me get every last drop out of there. I turn the flame off while I do this to help prevent boil-over. The water reacts quite violently when you add the extract and it's easy to get the pot to boil over. That's one of the reasons I'm no longer allowed to do this in the kitchen. The other is the smell. As soon as you add the extract, it puts out a strong smell of malt and sugar. It's overpowering and lingers for hours. I think that more than anything got me kicked out of the house.

I start the flame back up and wait until I have a nice rolling boil. I do this uncovered as the boiling wort will give off Dimethyl Sulfides. If the pot was covered these chemical compounds would collect on the lid and drip back into the pot, being reabsorbed by the wort. This leads to a vegetable like taste that is often associated with cooked corn or cabbage. I like corn as much as the next guy, but I don't want my beer to taste like it!

Once I have a nice rolling boil, I put in the Galena hops and start an hour timer. You'll note in the recipe that all the hop additions have a time marked next to them. This tells you when to add them to the wort. Wort is typically boiled for 60 mins, so the hop additions are marked by how much time is left in the boil. So being marked at 60 mins, means you throw them in with 60 minutes left of the boil, so the 45 minutes addition would be 15 minutes later, the 30 minute would be 15 after that, etc. Pretty easy, but seems backwards at first.

Not much to do while the wort is boiling, so I start sanitizing equipment for the later steps. First up I get a 6.5 gallon acid carboy out and start sanitizing it.

And of course, my help helper is there at every step of the way. Mostly getting under foot and trying to see if she can kill me with the glass carboy.

I also get the wort chiller out and ready to go. I use an immersion chiller (IC). The IC works by running tap water through a copper coil that is immersed in the wort. This acts as a big heat sink and carries the heat away in the water. It uses a lot of water, but works well and gets my boiling wort to 70 degrees in about 40 minutes. I don't bother sanitizing it, I just throw it in the pot with about 20 minutes left in the boil. That kills all the nasties on it.

Once the boil is done and the wort has been chilled, it's time to put it in the carboy. So I grab my trusty (and freshly sanitized) auto-siphon and start moving the wort from the kettle to the carboy. It takes a good 15 minutes to transfer, but it's easier than trying to lift and pour the kettle without spilling it. I use the opportunity to grab a sample and get a hydrometer reading. I ended up with a reading of 1.087. A pretty big beer. I tasted the sample out of curiousity. Yuck! Too sweet! Should be much better once the yeast have had a chance to do their work.

Once all the wort is in the carboy, it's time to bring it inside for the next step. With a beer this big, healthy fermentation is important. So I am taking lots of steps to ensure the yeast have everything they need to thrive. As I showed above, I created a starter to make sure I had enough yeast, now I am aerating to make sure the yeast have enough O2 to do the job. O2 helps the yeast build thick cell walls, this enables them to withstand the highly acidic environment and helps them multiply better. If the walls are too thin, they will die upon multiplying. I use an aquariam pump attached to a stainless steel diffusion stone. There is an inline filter in there to make sure I don't pull bacteria out of the air. I let this run for 45 minutes to an hour to put plenty of 02 in to the solution.

Once that is done I pitch my yeast and let them do their work! I place the carboy into a bath tub of water to keep the temperature around 65 and then I wait, and wait, and wait. That's it. Simple!

I'm glad I rememberd the boy scout motto! (Always Be Prepared)

OK, so I was never actually a boy scout. But it's still good advice. I brewed up a Russian Imperial Stout over the weekend. I took as many steps as I could to ensure a good brew and good fermentation. I prepared a half gallon starter in advance, I aerated the wort well, I brought the temp down to just below ferment temps before pitching, etc.

For every beer prior to this one, a standard airlock has been just fine. But in the back of my brain this weekend, I began to think that maybe, just maybe I should have a blowoff tube ready for this beer. So I had it out and sanitized and boy am I glad I did!

Sunday, the day after brew day, I checked on the stout early in the morning. It had a nice solid head of krausen on it at that time, nothing really too impressive, but nice. I did some chores for a couple of hours and decided to check on it before heading out to run some errands. Good thing too, the krausen had risen several inches and was just coming into contact with the airlock. I grabbed my blowoff tube and installed that in place of the airlock. 24 hours later, the tube is full of gunk. Gunk that would have been in my airlock, clogging it up.

Whew, disaster averted!

Cream Ale

My cream ale has been fermenting for 6 days now. The bulk of the fermentation appears to be finished, so I pulled a sample yesterday and again today. I got a reading of 1.012 yesterday and one of 1.011 today. So it appears that it's not quite done yet today.

This brew is considerably lighter than the ones I usually go for. It has a nice malty character, with just a hint of honey in it. The sample I tried yesterday also had a citrusy finish to it, but that seems to be gone today. Hopefully a little of that comes through in the final beer. Either way this should be a great summer thirst quencher.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this one will finish a little dryer, below 1.010 would be great. While I could probably rack it now, I'm going to let it sit a while. I might give the carboy a good shake and see if I can rouse the yeast from their nap.

I'm hoping it clears up a bit too, if it doesn't I'll throw some gelatin in the secondary and give it a couple of weeks. I want this one to be crystal clear if possible.

Oops

I intended to do a step by step photo blog of my last brew session, but I completely forgot. It was boring anyway, only one hop addition. I spent most of my time waiting.

I'll try to remember for this weekend's project. It should be a good one, a nice big Imperial Stout.

My first brew and the importance of temperature control

I decided to grab a bottle of my Amber Ale last night to see how it is coming along. It's been in the bottles nearly 3 weeks now and should be fully carbonated. I poured it into a glass, leaving the dredges behind. Still quite hazy, good head, nice carbonation. Looks like an amber ale, smells like an amber ale, does it taste like an amber ale? No, no it doesn't. After the first sip, I noted right away that the harsh alcohol taste was gone. I then noted that it tasted like someone dumped a whole crate of strawberries in it. Maybe a few bananas too. That might work for a hefeweizen, but that's no good for an amber.

I know where I went wrong here. It was just too warm. Being new to this, I didn't realize that the fermentation process would boost temps by 2-4 degrees. So while it was sitting in the low 70's, it pushed itself well above 75 for the bulk of the ferment. It and the Irish stout were the worst off, but the beers that follow have been far more closely monitored for temp.

I already picked up a temperature controller and will be grabbing a small chest freezer in the near future. That will allow me to keep a steady temperature and avoid this in the future. It also have the advantage of allowing me to lager. I'm looking forward to doing an Oktoberfest.

Racking to the Secondary

After 11 days fermenting, I decided to rack (move) the Pale Ale over to a smaller carboy for clearing and conditioning. It had a vigorous and fairly lengthy fermentation and could probably use another week or two to let the yeast clean up the beer a bit. While I could have done that in the primary, I need the larger carboy for this weekend's brew and had an hour to spare today.

The name of the game in brewing is sanitation. So the first thing I did was fill a bucket full of warm water, added some star-san and threw everything I was going to need into it.

I moved the pale ale from his bath-tub resting place and put him on the kitchen counter. I placed a newly clean and sanitized 5 gallon carboy onto a bucket directly below. I put two wedges underneath the Ale to help get more of the beer and less of the yeast. The ale ended up a really nice copper color. A little darker than I wanted, but still quite nice. The hop aroma was almost overpowering, the entire upper section of the carboy was coated in remnants of the hop pellets. The ferment was vigorous indeed! I thiefed a sample and took a hydrometer reading. 1.012. Spot on! As per usual, I quaffed the sample down. Wooo! Those hops are strong yet. A couple more weeks and they will fade quite a bit and hopefully leave me with a nice balanced beer. Still, aside from a strong hop flavor, the brew is quite clean. No unusual flavors. Bodes well.

I used my autosiphon to start the transfer to the secondary. This is a handy tool, has a small tip that allows it to sit a small bit from the bottom and avoid much of the trub. While I want some yeast to come along with the beer, I don't need the whole of it. Just a few to clean it up a bit, and of course to carbonate once we get to the bottles.

The transfer takes about 20 minutes, it gets quite slow at the end. But slow is better. I want to avoid any unnecessary splashing that might add oxygen to the beer. Nobody likes beer that tastes like cardboard.

Eventually I get it all transferred over. I'll place it back into the bath-tub and let it rest another week or two at 65 degrees. The into the bottles.

By the way, for anyone that uses glass carboys I highly recommend the brew hauler that you see on my carboys. 5 gallons of liquid is heavy and glass is quite slippery when wet. The last thing I want to do is drop a 5 gallon jug of beer on my foot. Messy and dangerous.

Well, that's all done! Beer is safely in it's new home and ready to be left alone for aging.

Now unfortunately, I have some cleaning to do.

52 Bottles of Beer on the Wall...

52 Bottles of beer. That's what I got out of my Irish Stout. At the time of bottling it still tasted a bit weak. Not bad, just watery. Hopefully carbonation will bring the flavors out.

Cooler Conversion

What do you get when you combine a 52-quart cooler, a toilet supply line, a ball valve and some miscellaneous brass connectors? A mash lauter tun!

I started with a Coleman Extreme 52-quart model that I picked up at Sears for $30.00.

I then made a trip to Home Depot to get a toilet supply line with a stainless steel braid, a 1/2" threaded connector, two 1/2" brass barbs and a ball valve.

I cut the ends off the supply line and removed the tubing from inside of it. To get the tubing out you really have to treat it like a chinese finger trap. Push in while you pull. It took a few minutes and I lost some blood in the process, but I got it out.

I then crimped one end of the stainless steel braid shut and attached the other end to one of the brass nipples with a hose clamp. I attached the hole thing to the threaded connector and shoved it through the hole that was left after removing the drain from the cooler.

I attached the ball valve and nipple to the other side, applied some silicone sealant to prevent leaks and I was done. Took maybe an hour of fiddling overall. Easy and cheap way to make a Mash Lauter Tun. This was my last obstacle for going all-grain. After I finish up my extract supplies, I'll be doing an all grain brew shortly after.

Bubbling Away Merrily...

My SNPA clone is fermenting nicely. It seems to come and go in waves. I had a strong fermentation at the beginning. It clogged up the airlock and nearly had me going for my blowoff tube, but the krausen began to fall and I figured it was about done. Not so! Two days later and it was again clogging the airlock. I think now it is finally nearing the finish line. I'll probably rack it to the secondary this weekend or early next week. Then I'm going to give it plenty of time to clear up while in secondary.

Looks pretty, doesn't it!

Next Batches

My carboys are all full up, but that doesn't stop me from planning my next couple of batches. I have the ingredients on hand for a Cream Ale and an Imperial Stout. The Cream Ale is a very light beer. It includes just 6 lbs of Pale syrup and some crystal malt. It's very lightly hopped and should make a great lawnmower beer. The Imperial is just about the opposite. It has a whopping 12 lbs of Amber syrup plus some roasted barley for flavor and color. It also takes a mountain of hops. This one I plan to let sit in the fermentor a long long time. I hope to get to one of these within a week or so.