Bottling Brew #2

So I just finished bottling brew #2. I used the “Who’s in the Garden Grand Cru” recipe in Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Final gravity was around 10.08, which is in the low range of the recipe, however, I don’t think the liquid was at 60 degrees, though it probably wasn’t much above 70 (I really need to buy a thermometer next time I go to the homebrew store). My guess is that the brew will clock in at about 5.5-6% ABV. Color is a hazy darker yellow. It smells nice, with a hint of orange and coriander. The taste is not very bitter, no doubt because I forgot to add the bittering hops until 20 minutes into the boil (oops!) But it tastes pretty nice. Obviously very green, but I can detect a hint of the orange peels and coriander I brewed it with. Despite the lack of bitterness, there’s not much residual sweetness.

It’s always very weird tasting the beer on its way into bottles. The lack of carbonation, and the newness of it, really makes it taste very different. In all honesty, I think this early sample actually tastes a bit better than the early sample of the last beer I brewed, and that one turned out pretty good. Despite my mishaps with the hops, I have high hopes for this one.

I almost decided to brew another beer tonight, but I held back. However, sometime in the next few weeks, I am seriously considering brewing the Vagabond Gingered Ale (brewed with fresh ginger!) recipe from Papazian’s book.

Vagabond Gingered Ale is a deliciously dark, full-bodied ale, with the gentle essense of fresh ginger.

Sounds like it’d be just perfect for the fall.

A Quick Note on Beer and Football

So I decided to watch the last quarter of the Texans/Vikings preseason game today. I don’t usually care much for preseason, even if my beloved Patriots are playing, but there was nothing else on and I just wanted to see some football. Anyway, it was a mistake. Turned it on right in the middle of an epic ESPN tongue bath of Brett Favre, culminating in Ron Jaworski orgiastically exclaim something to the effect of “Favre just makes the Vikings a better football team.”

Right. I’ll remember that when Favre’s in the middle of a 4 interception game, amid an embarrasing late season collapse. If Minnesota is going anywhere, it’s not on the back of an aging, overrated QB.

But anyway, Miller Lite had an incredibly stupid commercial on a little while ago, and it made me realize that as much as I am looking forward to seeing football return to the networks, I’m really NOT looking forward to football/half-naked cheerleader related Bud, Miller, and Coors commercials that we’ll be flooded with in no time. Your commercials are dumb, and I’m looking especially at you Coors. Cut it out. If I want to drink a Lite lager, I will buy Narragansett.

Also, I noticed that the commercial referred to Miller Lite as “triple hop brewed.”

HA!

The Tasting

I have been meaning to post about the tasting of the final product for a while, but I got caught up with a few things. In any case, I’m down to about 8 beers left, between giving them away and drinking them. I think it came out pretty well, but more specifics below.

I opened a new bottle just a few minutes ago so I could have a fresh tasting experience as I write. Unfortunately, the bottle snapped at the neck and starting shooting foam. I put no more than the recommended amount of priming solution into the bottling bucket, so I don’t know why this particular bottle was under so much pressure. I put all the other bottles into the fridge just to be safe. I managed to salvage enough beer for a tasting though.

The beer pours a mid-brown color, very cloudy. Good head retention, and lacing left over after the head subsides. I’m not quite sure how to describe the smell, but it smells nice. The beer has a nice body, nice malt flavor that flows into a slight bitterness in the aftertaste. It’s very nice. There is, however, a hint of residual, almost syrupy sweetness that I’m not too fond of. Could this be because the yeast didn’t ferment all the sugars? I’m not sure if this kind of taste is common to the style or not.

So, most of the beer has gone quickly, and the remainder will probably be gone soon. Although I wanted to save a couple of bottles to age, I don’t think I’ll do that for fear of more explosive bottle bombs. Overall, it was a good experience, and no infections so far! I’ve gotten some nice feedback from the people who have tasted it so far. Last weekend, my brother came to visit, and we sampled my beer next to Ommegang Abbey Ale. They defintely tasted different, but we both thought that mine held up pretty well against the professional brew. My bro thought that my beer had an earthyness (though not in a bad way, he said. Defintely not a barnyard flavor) that the store bought version lacked.

Brother was so impressed he wanted to brew a beer with me, so we went with the Grand Cru style beer at the end of Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Coriander and orange peels… yum. This new brew has been in the bucket since last Saturday, and the airlock has been bubbling along nicely since then, although it’s slowed down quite a bit at this point. If I remember correctly, this batch has been visibly fermenting for a lot longer than the Dubbel. I am going to leave this one in the bucket for three weeks before bottling because I’ll be out of town next weekend. I wonder if that will affect anything? Tune in again soon. I promise I’ll post more frequently.

The Bottling

So, it’s taken me over a week to post about my bottling experience. SORRY! I’m here now to describe the events. I first sanatized everything and laid it out on a sanitized drip tray:

Dripping dry to cleanliness

The night before, I sanitized my bottles by baking them in the oven. I had heard that it was possible this method could weaken the glass, and potentially cause the bottles to explode as they were conditioning. But really, I think the benefits outweighed the risks. By cooking them in the oven, all I had to do was occasionally raise the temperature until it hit 320 degrees, and then simply let them bake for 2 hours. All I had to do at that point is remember to turn off the oven before going to bed. Sanitizing 48 bottles with water and sanitizing solution seemed like too much of a hassle; I don’t even have a container that could have held all 48 bottles at once, and I didn’t have enough room to leave them to drip dry anyway. The oven was the easiest, least worrisome way. I took extra precautions with the oven, by very slowly raising up the temperature to 320 degrees over two hours. Then I let the bottles bake at that temp for two more hours. According to John Palmer, in his How to Brew book, this temperature for this amount of time will actually completely sterilize the bottles, rather than simply sanitize them. This was another reason that convinced me to go with baking; I reused all my bottles from beer that I had bought and drank, so I wanted to make sure any little beasties still left at the bottom were thoroughly gone. After the two hours, I shut off the oven, and let the bottles cool down over night and through until about 4 PM the next day.

A shot of the bottles, fully cooled

After everything was sanitized and dried, I cracked open the fermenter. A nice malty smell, with a bit of banana and apple. I put the fermenter up on a counter, placed the assembled bottling bucket just below the fermenter, filled up my vinyl tube with water, and started a siphon to move the beer into the bottling bucket:

Moving the beer

Here’s a good shot looking down into the fermenter. You can see the sediment left along the side of the bucket. If I remember correctly, that’s basically protein, waste, or other things that the yeast couldn’t fully process while it was turning the sugar in the original solution into alcohol.

Ring around the collar!

Finally, a shot of the bottling bucket filling up:

I was supposed to put a bit of newly boiled dried malt extract into the bottling bucket first. Once bottled, this additional sugar will allow the remaining yeast to ferment a bit more, thereby producing carbon dioxide, and carbonating the bottled beer. Unfortunately, I forgot to add the extra sugar until after I siphoned the new beer into the bucket. Hopefully, this won’t mess anything up.

The bottling bucket has a very useful spigot at the bottom of it. All I had to do to fill the bucket was put the bottle under the spigot, and turn the nozzle to fill. It wasn’t difficult, but took a while for all the bottles. To cap them, I had to use a crazy two handed lever contraption that looks like a cross between a medieval torture device and a two handled wine opener. Anyway, my hands were occupied during this, so I couldn’t take any pictures. The bottle capping went off mostly well, although I did crack one bottle because I put a little too much force into it. Oh well. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

After the bottling. What a mess!

One of the most interesting things I noticed through this whole experience was the look of the bottom of the fermentation bucket. Once I moved almost all of the beer into the bottling bucket, and the siphon finally petered out, I saw that the entire bottom of the fermentation bucket was covered in about a quarter inch of yeast. At least, that’s what I’m guessing it was. It looked like someone just poured a ton of wet sand into the bottom of the bucket. It was very cool looking, and I’m sad now that I forgot to take a picture of it. Maybe next time!

Finally, a shot of my bottled beer:

All in all, I ended up with 46 full bottles of beer. If I hadn’t cracked one during bottling, I would have had 47.

The recipe says to wait at least two weeks (maybe even four) for the bottles to age and carbonate. I almost weakened tonight and cracked one open, but my willpower prevailed at the last moment.

Tune in next week for the first tasting.

First Hydrometer Reading and an Early Taste

On Monday, I decided to crack open the fermenter. I know it hasn’t been two weeks yet, but I think that, because of the higher than usual room temperature in which the bucket was stored, the fermentation may have gone faster than expected, and could be bottled sooner rather than later.

Anyway, I opened the bucket and first noticed some sediment deposits ringed around the bucket at a level slightly higher than the level of the beer. This is pretty common, I think, and the residue even has a name that I can’t seem to remember right now. The fermentation must have been pretty vigorous because there was a lot of stuff left behind in this ring. The beer was a very dark brown, almost mahogany color and, encouragingly, smelled a lot like beer. I measured the gravity with the hydrometer, and came up with a 1.016 reading, which is within the Final Gravity range listed for this recipe (1.014-1.018). However, the temperature of the beer was probably closer to 80 degrees than 60 (though I didn’t have an exact number), so I had to revise my gravity reading up to around 1.020. This is higher than the final gravity range I mentioned above, but none of my measurements have been particularly precise. Some of this, also, could be because I didn’t exactly measure out my dried malt extract during the boil, and accidentally added more than necessary. For my purposes, it’s close enough.

Yesterday, I opened the bucket again and pulled out some beer with a sanitized measuring cup. I measured the gravity, which came out to be 1.016 again. I tasted it, and it wasn’t bad. It tasted, actually, a fairly similar to a Belgian Dubbel that I had about a week ago. It was dark and malty, without too much hop backing, and a light scent and flavor of bananas and apples. The major difference, of course, was that the beer was flat. I had had a couple of IPAs at a bar earlier that evening, though, so my taste buds may have been a bit fatigued and might not have picked out everything. I was encouraged by the results, though. It definitely tasted and smelled like beer.

I’d like to sample it again, but I’m already afraid I’ve managed to contaminate it by opening the bucket two days in a row. So, the bucket will stay sealed until I am ready to bottle, which will be either Thursday, or Friday. Tonight, if everything goes well, I will bake my bottles so that they’ll be sterilized, and ready for bottling on Thursday or Friday.

Thoughts and Early Fermentation

So, the brewing process was a little more difficult than I thought it would be. I think the reason for this is that I was rushing around a lot, checking the books and the recipes multiple times, and generally feeling rather frazzled over all. I think now that I’ve done it once, it will be smoother next time. Because I wasn’t too familiar with the sanitizing process, I was pretty concerned about an infection. I’m hoping that I managed to avoid this.

By Saturday evening, it seemed clear to me the the brew was fermenting. A steady, but not heavy bubbling was coming from the airlock, which continued up until probably late Monday. At first, the air coming out of the airlock smelled rather cidery, but it mellowed into a banana like smell by late Sunday/Monday.

I really don’t know how this is going to turn out! I know the Belgians can be fermented at a higher temperature, but it’s been very hot around here. I have tried to control the temperature by draping a cold towel over the bucket, but I’d say the temperature usually hangs around 78-81 degrees. Hopefully, this is not to high, or too much of a temperature range. I suppose I’ll find out. I plan on bottling around August 7, though perhaps a little earlier because of the temperature.

Brew Day Part 3

The boil has finished, so I dump 10 pounds of ice into the sink, along with all the ice in the ice tray from the freezer. Then I drop the brew pot into this icy sink for the cold break:

The wort was pretty hot, so it melted the crap out of all the ice pretty quick. As I was dumping a bit more ice into the sink, a few cubes fell right into the wort. They were definitely not sanitized, so I started worrying about infection at this point. Hopefully, everything will be OK.

The wort cooled fairly quickly, so I then I sparged it into the fermenter (which I had earlier drained of all the sanitizing solution). There was a lot of sediment that accumulated in the strainer that I used. Unfortunately, I was an idiot, because as I was about the pull the strainer away, I bumped it up against the side of the bucket, and caused a huge chunk of nasty looking sediment to fall into the fermenter. I tried to fish it out with a sanitized measuring cup, but i couldn’t seem to get a hold of it. Eventually, I gave up for fear of exposing the wort to more potential chances of infection. Finally, I then added two gallons of distilled water.

Next, I put the sanitized cover on the bucket, and proceeded to aerate the wort by shaking the damn thing around quite a bit. It was really heavy. Here’s what it looked like afterwards.

As you can see, tons of foam. Wasn’t quite expecting this. I let it sit for a while. After about 10 minutes, the foam had hardly gone down. I tried to pull out a bit of the wort in a measuring cup to get a hydrometer reading. Unfortunately, I dropped the hydrometer upside down into the container, and I couldn’t really flip it back upright. Then I tried to drop the hydrometer directly into the wort (after sanitizing it of course) but the foam was so high that I couldn’t get a reading. At this point, I just gave up, because I was starting to get worried that I was exposing the wort to contamination. So, I have no idea what the original gravity of my brew was. According to the recipe, it should have been between 1.060-1.064, but who knows? I think I added a bit more dried malt extract than necessary, yet I think maybe I didn’t get as much liquid malt extract out of the cans as I should have. Perhaps that will even out.

Almost done, I promise. At this point, I took out the liquid Belgium yeast from its comfortable place in the fridge, and shook it up pretty good. The foam inside the fermenter still hadn’t decreased much, so I just dumped it in on top of the foam. Then I put the top on the bucket again, and shook it up pretty good once more. Then I put the airlock on, filled it up with water, and shoved it into the corner of the room, as you can see here.

A summary of my thoughts in a few more days. Here’s a preview: this was a lot harder than I thought it’d be.

Brew Day Part 2

Right after I dropped the malt into the cold water, I added the hops:

After a while, I was able to bring the mixture up to a boil. It took a while to get there.

In the mean time, I added a crapload of sanitizing solution to the fermenter, along with 5 gallons of water, and dropped pretty much everything that came with the kit into it. I hope I didn’t over sanitize. The instructions on the can said to add 1 tablespoon per gallon, which I did. Also, I was a little concerned about the whole ‘no rinse’ sanitizer thing. I wasn’t too comfortable with letting these chemicals dry into everything, so I did rinse off anything I sanitized. Hopefully, this didn’t ruin anything.

I almost had a big time boil over in the kettle, but I managed to turn down the heat in time to save it. I think I may have scorched a bit of the extract malt, as there were some thick carmelized bits that were circulating around in the boil.

The end of the boil, and the cool down, coming up soon.

Brew Day Part 1

Brew Day came upon me unexpectedly. I was going to wait for a few more weeks, but instead, I decided to do it Friday. Why? Well, I’m not totally sure, but I think this had something to do with it. Thanks, Emerson, for funneling us poor grad students to your prefered loan lenders. The money you’ll be forced to pay me because of your malfeasance will fund the start of my adventure into homebrewing. The rest will go to my student loans, I swear.

Anyway, I ran out to my local homebrew store and bought a basic equipment kit, along with a bunch of ingredients. After talking to the guy at the store, I decided to settle on the Belgian style Dubbel that I mentioned in an earlier post. We both thought it would turn out better at the higher fermentation temperatures that I’m likely to encounter in my apartment. Sorry, Irish Red. I’ll come back to you in the winter. Here’s what the box looks like:

And the stuff inside:

To start, I filled my kettle with 2 gallons of water, and then started pouring the two 3.3 pounds (6.6 total) of liquid malt extract into the water. I kinda forgot to heat up the extract containers a bit so the syrup would flow out easier, so I think I lost a bit to the inside of the cans.

Next, I had to add 1.5 lbs of dried light malt extract. The store only had 1lb and 3lb bags; I bought the 3lb because it was cheaper overall. I realized I didn’t have a scale to weigh out the 1.5 lbs, so I kinda guessed.

I may have put more in than I should have. It took a while to get all the malt extracts dissolved into the water. I think I was supposed to heat up the water first, then put everything in, and then bring it to a boil. Instead, I dumped it into cold water, and everything clumped up until I was finally able to bring the water up to a boil. I really hope I did this right…

Next up, the boil. Look for that post in a few days.

The First Batch…?

So, I am having some difficulty deciding on what my first homebrew should be. I’ve decided that I don’t want to use a pre-hopped malt extract, as I’d like to deal with the hops myself the first time around. I’d also like to use a few speciality grains. Perhaps this is a little ambitious, but I’d like to try to do something a little unusual or daring on the first try. That being said, I don’t want to get too complicated.

At first, I thought I had settled on an Irish Red Ale recipe, found in the middle of Charlie Papazian’s book The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Here’s what it calls for:

5lb Briess amber malt extract syrup
1lb crystal malt
.5lb toasted malted barley
1oz Northern Brewer Hops
1oz Santiam or Tettnanger hops
American Ale Yeast

Doesn’t look too complicated, but not too simple either. One problem, though: I’ve noticed that my apartment gets pretty hot during the day, up to around 80 degrees. I’m sure I could find a cooler closet to store the fermentation bucket, but I doubt the temperature would be much under 80 in there either. 80 degrees, apparently, is a bit too hot for American Ale Yeast to work in. If I try to ferment at that temperature, I could get some off flavors, and I want to stay away from that on my first try.

I flipped through Papazian’s book a little more, and came across a recipe for a Belgian Dubbel:

3.3lb Briess Traditional Dark Malt extract syrup
3.3lb Briess Golden light malt extract syrup
1.5lb Extra light dried malt extract
1.25oz Styrian Goldings hops
Strong Belgian-style ale yeast

A little research has told me that Belgian ale yeast ferments at a higher temperature, so this kind of beer might be OK in the apartment during the day. In fact, this recipe looks easier than the Red Ale, because of the lack of speciality grains that I’d need to skim off before the boil. Furthermore, I haven’t drank much Belgian ale in the past, so this would certainly be something new. It is a Belgian, though. Aren’t they supposed to be scary and difficult? Maybe that’s just my misperception, but it’s giving me pause.

I’m not sure which one of these I should go with…