Science and more science

Yesterday I finished building a custom stir plate for use with starters. Thanks to Chris, with his desire to build stuff and his connections to obtain cheap lab glass, I've a working stir plate.

Video!

A bit of warning, though, the video is a bit loud. The stir stick and the whine from the power supply unfortunately come through annoyingly. When there's yeast and sugar in the water it'll be much quieter.

Now with this built, the next project is building a mash tun. Just need to find a 10 gallon rubbermaid cooler (the round cylindrical kind) on sale and the rest of the parts are cheap and easy to find. But no rush, as I'm almost sort of slightly entirely broke. Hopefully I'll be able to find something before I leave for Christmas.

The idea for my next brew day (and the beginning of my 2012 brewextravaganza) is the second week of January. I'd like to order materials and yeast right before I fly back home, so when I get home I can make a starter immediately, and in 3 days brew a custom porter (and label it this time!). Soon after that I've a double IPA in the works. After the DIPA, my plan is to go through a cycle of beers that will become "house brews", and they'll be recipes I keep making over and over until I get them customized enough to warrant a name, and make them well enough that I always have them on tap and have a base of beers to gauge experiments and experience on.

I have a few styles in mind - Irish Red (have the recipe, needs tweaking as the last time I made it I tasted little of it as it exploded), Porter (next brew day), Pale Ale (don't have a recipe yet), Hefe (no recipe yet, going to use Sarah to gauge taste), Brown Ale (no recipe yet, something plain but notably different from the irish red and the pale ale), and the DIPA.

Thinking about it now, my cycle for the year will be Porter - DIPA - Red Ale - Pale Ale - Brown Ale - Hefe, the repeat. Seasonal brews will happen between these, and mead is going to be made every 6 months or so. People seemed to like my imperial harvest ale, so I'm going to tweak that and make it again next year, and in addition to the harvest ale I'll be making a pumpkin using real pumpkin...but I don't have a recipe for that yet.

Next weekend I rack my mead to secondary where it'll sit for three more long months, and the day after my Christmas Ale is ready to drink. Hopefully the cherry flavor has mellowed out, I'll post a review on it in a week or two.

Winter beer bottled!

Just finished bottling my winter ale, and it turned out to be rather ... interesting. I didn't realize the effect that cherries and oak were going to have on the beer, and I fear I may have used far too much. The beer starts off smooth and slightly sweet, then a bit of oakiness. The aftertaste is a sharp touch of cherry, followed by a lingering slight bitterness. I sort of like it, but the cherry flavor I'm hoping mellows out with a couple weeks in the bottle. Next year I may increase the ginger by 20% or so, and decrease the amount of cherries and oak by 20% or so. We'll see what it tastes like in a couple weeks and how it ages to make any recipe-changing decisions. Who knows? The ginger flavor could come out strong, only time will tell.

Updates on cider, mead, and the bottling to come.

So I had Greg try the cider last night, and though he was polite about it - he really didn't care for it. Which is fine for me, as the cider was an experiment and all I did was throw yeast into it to see what happened. However, the experience has taught me that the next time I try to make hard cider - essentially apple cider wine - I'm going to use actual wine yeast, and not Nottingham ale yeast, despite how much people seem to like it. I came to the realization of the yeast when I thought that when it was dry - it wasn't that dry. This is because, or probably because, I used an ale yeast rather than a dry-finishing wine yeast, like champagne yeast.

Next year my plan is to get four gallons, apply the new yeast to all of them, then backsweeten one and I'll have two gallons each of dry and sweet hard cider. Though I'm also wondering seriously if the flat taste came from the pasteurization of the cider. Which means I should have six gallons, or some multiple of three, two raw, four pasteurized, so I can see the differences between dry, sweet, and unpasteurized vs. pasteurized. Problem with that is six gallons of cider is expensive for an experiment. Hopefully I'll have a bit more cash laying around next year for further experimentation.

Mead is fermenting famously, though it seems to have slowed a bit since yesterday. The temperature range has been terrible - from around 76-78 ro just below 68. Hopefully it should be fine, though it's extremely difficult to regulate the temperature in my tiny, old apartment.

I should have another post tomorrow about the christmas ale I've been excited about, as tomorrow is bottling day and I should have somewhere north of 3.5 gallons or so. Bottles ready, can't wait.

Yeast nutrient? More like fermenter hyper-explosion.

Never used yeast nutrient before today, when I added 2.5 teaspoons to 5 gallons on the third day after yeast pitching. I had no idea what to expect, to put it lightly. Soon as I dumped the first teaspoon in the fermenter, it basically all dissolved immediately in a bubbling froth of insanity. 1.5 teaspoons later and I had a huge bubbling mess that threatened to breach the fermenter's top. Stupid me didn't realize what was going on, so I shut the fermenter only to have the airlock go INSANE, and threaten to shoot off like a bottle rocket. So, hastily, I reopened the fermented just to have a good pint or so of thick foam shoot out the side. Luckily I had the foresight to put a towel under the fermenter and move the bucket to the kitchen. After the bubbles quieted down I resealed the fermenter and gave it a couple nice good shakes, each time the airlock was notably more active, then subsided shortly after.

I'm sort of running in the dark here with this whole mead business, but we'll see how it turns out and make changes the next time after I've finished the full production of primary, secondary, and bottling. Thankfully, bottling is very easy, so there shouldn't be any problems or blips with that procedure, despite never bottling something without sealed bottle caps before.

Another interesting point to note - when I opened the fermented there was no krausen to be found. I thought this was odd, as the smell coming out of the airlock was notably fermention-ladeled, and the airlock was producing a "it's definitely fermenting" amount of air. With a quick google search I discovered that mead can run the range from no krausen to explosive krausen.

It's also more evidence and force toward every time in the future that I do not use a smack pack, I will be doing a starter. Cider with dry yeast and mead with dry yeast both have produced the same sort of ... slow, boring, and nondescript ... fermentation that hints to me that either I have too high gravity liquid (extremely not likely) or that I'm not treating my yeast with the respect it deserves. So in addition to building a water cooler mash tun, I will be obtaining materials (mostly just a flask) to construct a starter vessel.

I should also consider actually doing gravity readings....

Mmm, cider

Bottled my first cider just now, and I'm surprised at how easy the entire process was. From start to finish took two weeks, and the hardest part was sanitizing the buckets and bottles. Star san makes it easier to sanitize bottles, though, compared to one step.

When I first cracked open the fermenter, I didn't expect the cider to taste the way it did. I was expecting something much drier, and the taste was entirely drinkable and delicious. I still added 6.8 oz of lactose, though, to backsweeten the two gallons. It's .4 oz too much, but whatever. The sugar cut through the dryness with a light touch. The cider wasn't that much sweeter, but the dryness was considerably diminished and it became slightly easier to drink.

I like to use the test of something's tastiness by giving a small sample to my gf. She'll taste it, then if she goes for a second taste and won't give me back the glass I know I've succeeded in making something tasty.

Next time making cider I'm not only going to use much more, but I may try to referment some in the bottle to make sparkling cider or play around with different blends or types of yeast. Milburn's Cider and Nottingham Yeast make a tasty drink, though.

Mold? No!

Earlier today, a friend of mine asked me how I was doing my secondary, and if I've been checking for mold. Intrigued, I did some googling and couldn't find anything about mold problems with using fruit in a secondary. When I couldn't find anything, he linked me to the thread where first heard about mold. Curious, I whipped up some sanitizer and cracked open my secondary, only to find a light layer of krausen and a wonderful smell of yeast - no mold here! Whew! Christmas Ale is still on target for a bottling in just over a week and a half.

Mead supplies came today, and I'm hoping to bottle the cider Friday and start the mead either then or the following weekend.