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Welp, I brewed my first batch ever. I went with the California Common recipe in the Brewing Classic Styles book with the only change being that I accidentally used regular chocolate malt for steeping instead of pale chocolate malt. In 12 hours or so I've already got considerable bubbling, which makes me feel better while I'm busy freaking out about whether or not I already infected it. My current fermentation chilling system (I'm supposed to keep it at 62 while ambient is closer to 73 here) is a big bucket with water and the occasional ice pack + wet t-shirt and fan. I can't seem to find one of those tall Ice Cube coolers that will hold temperature more reliably. What's the next best suggestion?
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# ¿ May 6, 2013 02:42 |
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 21:11 |
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Xeus posted:what yeast did you use? A lot of California Common's should be brewed ~ 70 degrees. 62 will be just fine with any yeast imo, it might have a slightly different flavor profile though. I'm just going off what the book tells me. It's the White Labs San Francisco Lager yeast. I'm mainly interested in setting something else up because it's a pain in the rear end to keep monitoring and switching out frozen water bottles.
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# ¿ May 6, 2013 19:40 |
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The last 2 years my friends and I have been going to Russian River for Pliny the Younger and waited forever and ever in line, so we are sick of it this year. In the last year I've really gotten into homebrewing so I'm going to try to make my own this year following this recipe http://www.bertusbrewery.com/2013/03/pliny-younger-clone-20.html . Wish me luck, it's higher gravity than I've ever made before and I'll be doing it BIAB! I think I'll need a blowoff tube this time.
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# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 05:30 |
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Post #1: Today I brewed (mixed?) a new cider primarily for my wife. 5 gallons of Tree Top and 1 lb of Turbinado sugar putting the OG around 1.06. My plan is to ferment all of that out, then add a combination of apple juice concentrate, maple syrup, and more Turbinado sugar to bring the SG back up to around 1.04, bottle it, then pasteurize the bottles in a week or so after I've confirmed it got some carbonation. I used the Belgian Strong Ale yeast in hopes it'd add some interesting flavor but I don't expect much. a) is this a really stupid idea? the pasteurization? As far as I can tell, it's the only way to get carbonated sweet cider in bottles that doesn't involve using lactose and might actually taste good. I saw people putting 150 degree water in a cooler, adding the bottles, and waiting 40 minutes or so to do this. b) is 1.04 going to be disgustingly sweet? She likes very sweet ciders, "iceman" if you've had it, and enjoys ciders even sugarier than the Woodchuck variety. Given that the regular Tree Top is 1.05 I think 1.04 is fine but I have no clue. Glottis fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Jan 21, 2014 |
# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 03:24 |
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Post #2: I've got my first ever all grain batch in the fermenter. I brewed it about 2.5 weeks ago, and just over a week ago I added 3oz of Amarillo for the dry hopping. I was hoping to keg it today but I just can't seem to get this layer of dry hops on the top to fall in. It was huge earlier today before I tried smacking the carboy and most of it fell, but this last bit has been there for hours despite repeated attempts. Should I: a) wait a couple more days for it to fall in b) ignore it and keg it anyway, just trying to avoid the hop chud? Here's a picture (I had just smacked it, which is why you can see a few bits falling down):
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 03:30 |
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Jacobey000 posted:a) I think home-pasteurization of homebrew is loving insane and way too dangerous to attempt, but I also would never, ever buy glass carboys. I'm not as worried about bottles exploding. I'll take precautions to prevent injury / mess and it's not a big deal if I lose some. And yeah the apple juice is 1.05 out of the bottle so I don't think it'll be gross sweet if I get up there. As for carbonation, what I meant to say was that I'd be opening bottles on a daily basis until it was fermented, max a week - but it sounds like I should be opening bottles every several hours or so or at least using a plastic bottle as well. For the record, my house is pretty much constantly ~65 degrees and takes a decently long time for other beers to bottle carbonate. BLARGHLE posted:Like Jacobey said, a week is way too long with that much sugar, and it'll probably be more like a day before it gets up to proper carbonation levels. Just open a bottle every 12 hours or so to check the carb, or you can fill a couple of little plastic soda bottles and use their firmness as a pressure gauge. That takes a bit of practice to get right, and I like to keep one still full of soda as a reference. Definitely err on the side of caution with the carbonation though(a not-quite-fully-carbed batch is a lot better than losing half of the batch to glass grenades). I pasteurize in a big canning pot on the stove, and while I have never had any bottles violently explode with shrapnel and terror like a lot of people seem to expect, I have had a few pop in the pot like little depth charges. Yeah, my plan was to do the cooler thing and attempt to account for the temperature lost into the bottles, i.e. putting ~170 degree water in there and hoping it only drops 20 degrees. Maybe I'll put ~120 degree water in first for a while, drain, then put the hot stuff in to reduce the shock and temperature loss when the temperature is key.
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# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 00:31 |
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BLARGHLE posted:I'd like to know how the cooler works, because doing it on the stove is kind of a pain in the rear end, and also very time consuming.
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# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 16:12 |
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illcendiary posted:I got a $100 one myself and have no idea how to spend it. Makes me wish they sold thermapens. well, what's your setup now?
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# ¿ Jan 23, 2014 08:56 |
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Time for more amateur questions: Somehow managed to BIAB my Pliny the Younger clone without tons of spilling as a close adaptation of this: http://www.bertusbrewery.com/2013/03/pliny-younger-clone-20.html (thanks to some help from friends). My 40qt pot was at its MAX. - I know you are supposed to leave the trub back in the kettle but it was basically homogeneous for me. I waited 20 minutes or so hoping the Whirlfloc would separate it a bit but ended up transferring almost all of it to the carboy. Is there something I'm supposed to be doing to prevent that? - Is there any benefit in siphoning some of that chud on the bottom of the carboy out? - My OG came out a bit high (1.10 instead of 1.09) - worth trying to adjust with distilled water?
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# ¿ Jan 26, 2014 19:51 |
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OK. Well, it's a 6.5 gallon carboy, I think the fluid level is around the ~5 gallon line if not higher, but I'm not sure as I forgot to mark it out. Tap water isn't going to infect my beer?
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# ¿ Jan 26, 2014 20:44 |
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Just bottled a case of cider (2.5 gallons) after adding 3 family size cans of apple juice concentrate and a couple cups of maple syrup. Went from 1.005 to 1.04. If I don't post an update it's because I waited to long to pasteurize and my apartment catastrophically exploded.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2014 21:26 |
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Came back to my keezer 20 minutes after getting a beer to find that my first kegged 5 gallon batch of beer had been completely emptied in there. I had drank about 5 pints from it. It's hard to describe how pissed that makes me, especially since I don't really know how it happened and I really liked the beer. I might try to remake it tomorrow.
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# ¿ Feb 6, 2014 06:41 |
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So here's an update on my quest to make a sweet cider / pasteurization. I backsweetened up to 1.04 or so (half the batch, because I didn't want to risk all of it). I also had a plastic bottle with the sweet stuff so I could tell when it was as carbonated as I'd like, and at that point I started pasteurizing. What I didn't account for, and haven't seen anyone mention specifically online, is that when you heat bottles up it's gonna shove the CO2 out of solution and raise the pressure dramatically. Maybe the bottles can handle 4.5 ATM (sierra nevada bottles) and I want 3 ATM in carbonation, but once you put 150 degree water on it, the pressure goes up to ~5 ATM. So really I'd have to have cut it off somewhere in the 2 range, because about 1/2 to 2/3 blew up in the cooler. The sound of bottles exploding is quite jarring so I could see how they'd do damage but they all blew up in a closed cooler and quite loudly. The ones that survived (and I carefully removed with thick gloves, eye protection, etc and then refrigerated before opening) tasted like Martinelli's to an eerie degree, but with secret booze. Anyway, this was a learning experience and I thought it was worthwhile just to know. It tastes good but the takeaway is that you can't carbonate past the level you want + heat expansion. Photo of the aftermath (I still need to work up the courage to remove the remaining good ones)
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# ¿ Feb 14, 2014 05:35 |
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BLARGHLE posted:Yeah, when I said to err on the side of caution with the carbonation, I really meant it! If mine even go a day longer than I think they should, then I don't pasteurize. It sucks that you lost so many...I hope that batch wasn't too expensive. transfatphobic posted:What recipe did you use? I'm intrigued by your final results. It's tasty. I used straight TreeTop with a little bit of Turbinado sugar added to bring it up from 1.05 to 1.055ish. Then I added enough maple syrup just to carbonate and bottled half the batch. With the remaining half, I added a bunch of apple juice concentrate and more maple syrup to backsweeten. Considering how much maple syrup I added it doesn't taste hardly maple-y at all, I was worried about making it disgustingly so. I haven't tasted the dry one yet and the maple might be more pronounced there without the tart apple concentrate also influencing it.
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# ¿ Feb 16, 2014 00:37 |
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Fluo posted:Dry hopping in primary will make most the hoppyness that you would get from dry hopping scrub off in the c02 because of the main ferment. The only drawback from dryhopping in secondary is sometimes you might get a grassy / oily taste and or smell. I've never had that though. All you have to do is wait until the main fermentation is over... that article is very old fashioned. Secondary is a waste of time unless you are working with a beer where freshness isn't an issue and/or you want to add some stuff to it.
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# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 08:30 |
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For those of you who use secondary vessels as a way to clarify the beer, have you tried using gelatin? Obviously if it's a lager it's gonna sit around for a long time anyway, but I'm pretty sure you'll get to the super clear zone a lot faster with gelatin.
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# ¿ Feb 19, 2014 23:36 |
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Josh Wow posted:I just started using gelatin recently because I forgot my whirlfloc on 2 batches and just moved and have no vegan friends at the moment. The difference in clarity is amazing with gelatin. My beers look drat near filtered now, something I could never get with just a cold crash. I'm looking to try out Biofine Clear to keep things vegan, hopefully it works just as well. There's also Agar Agar, which I hear works pretty much identically to gelatin.
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# ¿ Feb 20, 2014 20:42 |
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Do you guys have any experience dry hopping in a keg? Room temperature? Hop bag?
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2014 03:26 |
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BLARGHLE posted:I wonder if hops+vodka=hop extract in the same way that vanilla beans+vodka=vanilla extract? I've not personally done it but I hear it extracts more of the stuff you don't want, i.e. grassy pungent flavors. The supercritical CO2 stuff does not, somehow.
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2014 07:04 |
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Painted bottles like stone wipe off after a multi-day starsan soak. Some colors are worse than others.
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# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 02:55 |
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ShadowCatboy posted:Finally started a new batch of mead! I only have 1-gallon carboys for now though, but so far the little guy is foaming away beautifully. I just capped it with the airlock (without any liquid in it, so the mead still has some breathing room) and I cap it and give it a good shake twice a day. Plan to fill the airlock after three days or so. Maybe I'm missing something, but why wouldn't you put sanitizing liquid in the airlock?
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# ¿ Mar 11, 2014 17:44 |
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I had my first party in which my homebrews were featured and it was generally a success - it was centered around brewing my own version of Pliny the Younger so people could taste something similar without waiting in line for a jillion hours. Turns out I oxidized the poo poo out of it and overshot my OG so it was too boozy. I have a year to practice my anti-oxidation techniques this time. However, the other 2 full batches of beer I brewed were really tasty and people destroyed them. One was a somewhat hoppy Sorachi Ace / Cascade blonde ale, and the other was a clone of the criminally underrated Cold Smoke Scotch ale. Both were awesome, although I wish I'd had time to clear the blonde with gelatin before the event. If anyone wants recipes for either, let me know.
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# ¿ Mar 12, 2014 04:28 |
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This weekend I'm planning to make a Berlinerweisse with the sour in mash tun / use grain hulls to inoculate method. Does anyone here have personal experience with that? I'm fully aware that there's a decent chance I'll end up making something that smells like vomit.
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# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 08:19 |
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ScaerCroe posted:Check our SA Brewtoad group and I have a BW Recipe listed that turned out fantastic with this method. Basically, do a mash of 3 pounds each barley and wheat, let it convert, throw in some acid malt for a bit to lower pH. Let it chill out to ~100 and innoculate with some leftover grain. Leave it for 2 days, boil, and pitch some regular yeast. Any reason why the recipe has you add the acidulated malt to the sparge? Why can't I just put it with the other grains in the mash and do the souring there? My only temperature-stable vessel is my mash tun so it'd be best to keep it in there. edit: Another noob question semi-unrelated to that. How am I supposed to get 5 gallons of keggable beer out of a 5.5 gallon boil? There's always a ton of trub in there. Usually I just siphon everything into my fermenter and let the Whirlfloc do its thing, but then there's about a gallon of poo poo on the bottom when it's done and I only have 4.5 to drink. Less if I used dry hops. Glottis fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Mar 13, 2014 |
# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 17:10 |
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more falafel please posted:I work backwards -- I want about 5 gallons or a little more to drink. Figure 1/2 gallon for trub/sediment in the fermenter, so 5.5 into the fermenter. Figure a quart for trub in the kettle, so 5.75 post-boil. Figure about a gallon of boil-off, so 6.75 pre-boil. If I get 3 gallons out of my first runnings, I'll sparge 3.75. Do you filter coming out of your kettle, or just wait for a while for it to settle? I feel like when I've got about 5.5 gallons in the kettle and wait for an hour for it to settle, I can only get maybe 4 gallons out before it's truby again. I think I just need to try to have 6 gallons at the end of my boils.
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# ¿ Mar 14, 2014 00:40 |
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more falafel please posted:
What I mean is that it'd take forever for the trub to really compact such that there's only .5 gallons of it in the kettle. I use pellet hops and I make sure to vorlauf enough that there's not a TON of proteins going in the boil, but maybe not well enough?
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# ¿ Mar 14, 2014 07:09 |
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I will echo that the outlet is probably clogged with hops or something. It takes a tiny amount of hop chud to completely clog one of those poppets, I learned the hard way. edit: and now I just spent $26 on 2 vials of yeast being shipped like 30 minutes away from me Glottis fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Mar 15, 2014 |
# ¿ Mar 15, 2014 00:34 |
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Jacobey000 posted:
Yeah, I was planning on doing the plastic wrap thing. Ideally I'd have some sort of fixture that slides in my mash tun.
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# ¿ Mar 16, 2014 02:39 |
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I use it as a reference point. If I want to make a new style, I compare the BCS recipe with an internet "clone" recipe of my favorite beer from the style, and come up with something along that spectrum. I like every recipe I've made verbatim from it, which is admittedly only a few.
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# ¿ Mar 21, 2014 02:26 |
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crazyfish posted:Do you mean Biofine? If so, that's good to know; I have some vegan friends that like beer and while I like clear beer, I also don't like putting ingredients in that would ruin their ability to drink the beer. I was gonna say... isn't putting bromine in your beer a very bad idea? Reminds me of when my brother accidentally said he'd been purging his beers with CO religiously.
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# ¿ Mar 25, 2014 16:54 |
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I brewed a 1.042 OG Pale Ale with the Vermont Ale (Conan) yeast. I think it's more touchy than I am used to because I seem to have put the yeast to sleep at 1.017, potentially from dropping a couple of degrees a day into active fermentation. Now experimenting with adding some corn sugar to see if I can wake it back up at ~72 degrees. 100% sure it's not a mash temp problem, unless Vienna has some weird thing I wasn't aware of. Simultaneously to that experiment, currenty brewing my Rochefort 8 replica from Candi's recipe here: http://www.candisyrup.com/uploads/6/0/3/5/6035776/rochefort_8_clone_-_040.pdf . I'm similarly worried about attenuation and I'm going to save the D180 for an addition once fermentation starts to slow.
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# ¿ Apr 8, 2014 02:25 |
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wattershed posted:Gonna build my own stir plate, taking advantage of my gigantic bin of random chargers, cables, old hard drives and whatnot that I haven't touched in 10 years. Instructions here. Figure this is smarter than buying a second one, especially if I have all the parts on hand. Well, almost all the parts. I know I'm doing something that really annoys me when people ignore the actual question, but... I personally don't think you need a rheostat. Do you have any idea of how fast the computer fan spins when hooked up normally to a computer power supply? Some are faster than others.
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# ¿ Apr 11, 2014 00:43 |
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Imaduck posted:It is true that some spin faster than others, but typically it's too fast and it's going to be hard to capture your stir bar if it always starts off spinning really fast. Having adjustable speed is nice because you can start it slow and ramp it up. On mine, if I start it at the max speed, it will immediately throw the stir bar. Whatever works for you, I just personally feel that's overly complex. Just use a lower voltage power supply if it's too fast (the 5V power supply I initially used was too slow for the fan I had, actually). I hold the fan still until I get the stir bar to stick to it, then I let go / spin it once it sticks, and I have zero problems. Separate topic: Does anyone have a good source for Belgian-style cappable bottles or bottles that are otherwise capable of holding decently high pressure? I'd like 375ml/12oz bottles if possible, but everything I find seems pretty expensive. The bottles I usually use are Anchor bottles that would probably explode if you looked at them funny. Glottis fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Apr 11, 2014 |
# ¿ Apr 11, 2014 20:07 |
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Jo3sh posted:I just made up a pseudo-thermowell for yesterday's batch. Since it's a lager, I wanted the wort at about 50 degrees for pitching, so when I loaded the fermenters into the fridge, I put the probe from the STC-1000 underneath one of them, in the dead space formed by the slightly domed bottom of the Better Bottle. This morning, it's perfect. The controller and the stick-on thermometers agree that it's time to go pitch yeast. I just simultaneously discovered this method yesterday for a beer I had just brewed and it seems so obvious now. Works great.
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# ¿ Apr 13, 2014 18:05 |
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"We caught up with a local homebrewer who has just recently heard of this proposed legislation and has skimmed some online articles and posted them to his facebook feed in protest." Awesome.
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# ¿ Apr 16, 2014 03:24 |
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Yesterday (late, ugh) I brewed my Consecration kit from MoreBeer. I'm starting to really like the idea of "no sparge" brewing and I seem to hit the efficiencies I want without issue. This recipe had 12 lbs of grain, I have a 10 gal mash tun, so it ended up being the exact correct boil volume without sparging. Pretty cool. Another new thing I tried was just putting my hose water straight in my mash tun cooler to the 9 gal line and using my immersion circulator to heat it up to the correct temp. That way I don't have to worry about the heat capacity of the mash tun itself and can save some propane at the expense of time.
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# ¿ May 1, 2014 17:17 |
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fullroundaction posted:What was your overall brewhouse efficiency? I get confused with what exactly "brewhouse efficiency" means, but my mash efficiency was 70%. Previously, using single infusion mashes with a sparge volume roughly equal to the original infusion volume, I was hitting exactly 70% each time. This is the second batch I have tried no-sparge with, the first one was a Kolsh that hit 78% efficiency, the first time I've gotten over 70%.
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# ¿ May 1, 2014 20:18 |
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more falafel please posted:"Brewhouse efficiency" is basically taking the volume in your fermenter and multiplying it by gravity points (so 5 gallons at 1.050 would be 250) divided by the potential gravity points in the grain. 2-row, for example, has 37PPG potential, so 10 lbs of 2-row can potentially make 370 gravity points. 250/370 = ~67% brewhouse efficiency. This accounts for all losses (except boiloff, because that doesn't change the total gravity points). Ah, ok. I thought sometimes it used the volume of how much you got into the serving system (bottle or keg) to take into account how much you lose when transferring out of the fermenter. When I'm calculating my efficiency I'm generally only concerned with what I'm doing with the mash, as the amount I leave in the kettle and fermenter are very consistent.
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# ¿ May 1, 2014 23:51 |
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Yesterday I brewed a very hoppy pale ale type thing using hops ONLY post-boil, 4 oz at flameout and 6 oz at 180 degrees for 30 min before chilling. It will be interesting to taste but it seems like it's going to be pretty great. http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/132190/next-level-hoppy-thing I got annoyingly low efficiency after having the shop crush my grains for the first time, so I guess that I means I have to try it myself next time again, ugh. Maybe it's me?
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# ¿ May 16, 2014 17:28 |
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 21:11 |
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Just brewed a small batch to bring to the Firestone beer festival: Black ale with Conan yeast and Warrior hops
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# ¿ May 20, 2014 18:51 |