Rounding Out the Long Weekend

I made time to get some brewing to-dos finished before the week started and had the foresight to take a few pictures:

This is me testing the final gravity of the First Noel Christmas Ale. The gravity was right on the nose so I transferred it to secondary. The cylinder I am holding allows samples to be drawn and then returned to the fermenter (although I couldn't help but sneak a taste, and it was delicious). Two weeks of aging and then it will go into bottles. It will be officially ready to drink by Christmas Day but will be good for at least a year after that.

This is the yeast from the First Noel; it went into sterilized Mason jars for re-use. Twelve gallons of beer yielded 5.5 pints of delicious yeast. The labels on top show what it is and the use date. This will be used for a Saison in the near future.

(This is for reference only. See how the yeast separates from the beer? This is from Batch 17 American Wheat, and will be re-used in the coming weeks.)

I also made new, tidier blow-off tubes for Batch 18. I didn't like the octopus look of the previous blow-off tubes, which weren't sealing well anyway. These take up a lot less space and work better, although for some reason they are much quieter. My wife, the Fair Wx Runner, has taken up knitting and commented how she could hear the occasional burp of the fermentation with the previous tubes. These are quiet as a church mouse. No more blurp-blurp while she is knitting her latest project.

The Danger of Belgian Yeast

As far as I know, there is only one: it can be extremely active. We were gone most of the day for Thanksgiving, and when we got home this evening this is what I saw:

Well, not quite. The right fermenter had an airlock installed and the lid was bulging up so far I was sure it would explode any second. So I quickly pulled it and installed the only blowoff hose I had, then took the picture. The left fermenter was also bulging so I pulled the airlock to let it deflate a little and quickly made another blowoff assembly, then went to work cleaning up all the yummy-smelling, disgusting-looking, blown-off yeast.

I had started these batches at 68 degrees, and when I took the picture they were at 78 degrees. I had briefly used a heating pad to get the temperature ramping up, but by this time it had been off for more than eight hours, so they were producing all that heat themselves. This batch being a tripel, I'm glad they got that warm because it will just mean more Belgian ester flavors (think banana). Once I got everything installed and cleaned up, it looked like this:

With these fermenters both blowing off into the same jar of dilute Star San solution, it sounded (according to the Fair Wx Runner) like the beer was having serious intestinal problems. Fortunately, that's not the case: that's some happy beer, and in three months there will be some happy folks drinking it.

Batch 20 in the Tank

Today was both a construction day and brew day.

Construction

The development of the brewing rig continued with the installation of burners and the addition of a March pump.

The burners replaced the turkey fryers, which had been temporarily strapped to the rig using radiator hose clamps (highly ghetto, I know, see below). The new burners are neatly in place on a piece of unistrut, and worked like champs. We are controlling them with dial controls from a gas grill. This setup worked great, but we need to decide how to route the gas lines and permanently mount the controls to the rig. We will also eventually add pilot lights or piezo-electric sparkers to more easily light the burners.

We also tested the March pump that Jim bought. It worked great once we figured out how to prime it, which was a challenge. That lesson took about an hour and was pretty frustrating. But once we learned how to prime the pump for each use, it worked like a champ. We used it to add water to the mash; transfer wort to the boil kettle; and add sparge water. We have a few improvements to make, including adding quick disconnects, but it was definitely a step forward in our brewing process. I expect we will add a second pump in time to allow for fly sparging.

Brewing

Batch 20 is Northern Brewer's Tripel. The grain bill set a record for our operation: 26.5 pounds. It filled the mash cooler almost completely full. We had several issues getting the mash water pumped from the lauter tun to the mash tun, but once that was resolved everything went great. We used the March pump to recirculate the wort during mash and both sparges, which was very effective.

We ended up with ~14 gallons preboil and ~11.5 gallons in the fermenters. The chilling process went great, and in fact reduced the chill water dramatically just to keep the wort temperature from falling too low. We pitched directly onto the yeast cakes from Batch 18. Overall efficiency was 82 per cent, with OG of 1.074.

Batch 17 in the Bottle

American Wheat. 4.45% ABV. 1.048 OG, 30.77 IBU, 3.8 SRM. Classic American Wheat beer.

I spent part of this afternoon bottling the first 10-gallon batch: #17, American Wheat. Gone is the 6-gallon "Ale Pail" for bottling; in is the 15-gallon keggle (see below) with a custom dip tube. We netted more than 100 bottles and split them evenly between my brewing buddy, Jim, and me. The process took two hours including clean-up time.


I experimented with a new spring-tip bottle filler, which worked  better than the previous one I have been using for more than a year. I bought it after my previous filler kept clogging when bottling the coffee stout. The spring-tip design seemed to have less aeration at the beginning of each fill and dripped less when going from bottle to bottle. Northern Brewer claims my previous one is easier to clean; we will see.

Tomorrow is brew day with a Pitchfork Tripel.

Cooler Weather Arriving

Here in Wichita the weather is turning cooler, which makes it easier to chill the wort but will may cause challenges once the temperature dips below freezing (we run our chill water from the outside faucet). So we are working hard to brew enough beer to carry us through the winter. Our plan is to bring brewing operation inside, but that is probably a 2012 project. Hope you are enjoying the changing seasons and finding good beer to celebrate the holidays.

Big Arbor

Home brewer.