The Lusty OwKABOOM!

The Lusty Owauku exploded.

Twice.

Y’see, one of the things I’ve now learned about brewing high gravity beers is that the primary fermentation is…vigorous. As the beer ferments, it gains a sludgy, foamy head, called krausen. The more intense the fermentation, the larger this krausen is. Up until the Lusty Owauku, the 1.5 gallons of headspace in my fermentation bukkit has been more than enough for this krausen to fully form, then fall back as fermentation slows.

Not so in this case. On the second day of fermentation, there was sludge in my fermentation lock. It was actually being pushed up by nothing more that the sheer power of the yeast fermenting.

I was clueless, and the lock was still bubbling, so I shrugged it off and went to bed. Some hours later, BANG! The whole house shook.

I will repeat that. The whole house shook.

My wife and I investigate. The lid has been blown sky-high, and there was protobeer and sludge all over the dining room. We groggily cleaned up, I reseated everything, and we went back to bed. Surely, the worst was over?

Of course not.

Two hours later. BANG! This time, there was protobeer on the goddamn ceiling. Oh, how I suffer for my craft. Additionally, the fermentation lock has cracked.

That’s right: there was so much pressure that the fermentation lock has a massive crack running along its length. I was impressed. Horribly annoyed, but impressed.

Clearly, things were not working as it was. So, I grabbed some tubing, another, small bukkit, and created a blowoff system. Essentially, I replaced the fermentation lock with this plastic tube, which led into the bukkit. As the fermentation went nuts, it would push the sludge out through the tube and into the bukkit. Some water in the bukkit ensured that no rogue bacteria or yeast would find their way up the tube.

So, for two additional days, the Lusty Owauku fermented so hard that it pushed sludge out the blowoff tube and into the bukkit. I’d say about a quart of detritus was expelled. Once it died down, I replaced the tube with an extra fermentation lock, and the beer proceeded to ferment away for the next week and change.

Today I put the Lusty Owauku into secondary. It was straightforward; sanitizing my glass carboy, siphon, tubing, and ladle. Why ladle? So that I could measure the gravity of the beer, to see how well it fermented. According to my recipe calculator, my starting gravity was about 1.112, or, ya know, three times higher than an average beer’s starting gravity. The final gravity for this beer should be between 1.029 and 1.035. The actual gravity of the beer as of today? 1.035.

Excuse me while I do a happy dance.

I expect that the gravity will very slowly drop over the next three months, and, at bottling, will end up squarely in the range we want. The first phase is complete, and aside from the explosions, it went well(as an aside, I’ve always wanted to be able to legitimately say something like that).

Oh, and it already tastes amazing. This beer is going to be a frigging beast in three months.

Lusty Owauku 3: The Brewening

It is done. The Lusty Owauku has been brewed, and it is fermenting like crazy as you read this. Unless you’re reading this months after the fact. In which case, greetings from 2011!

Now, as I said in my previous entry, I needed to significantly expand my equipment loadout to brew an imperial stout, so let’s examine this in further detail, as this equipment and these methods will come to serve my future beermaking endeavors well.

It begins, as always, with the yeast. For beers with high alcohol content, like imperial stouts, IPAs, or even bock lagers, the amount of yeast cells contained in a typical homebrew yeast packet is insufficient to rapidly and fully ferment out. The amount of fermentable sugars is simply too high. So, what’s a girl to do? Make a yeast starter!

The idea here is to get the yeast to actively begin fermentation before you pitch them into your wort. Not only will they have a higher overall population, but they’ll be in an active phase of their life-cycle, and immediately ready to eat sugar and poop alcohol.

The method is simple: you boil a small amount of water and dry malt extract to give the yeast something to eat–an appetizer of sorts. You then cool this starter in a glass beaker or other sealable, cleanable container (you could use one of your beer bottles, for example, although the narrow mouth does introduce practical difficulties). Once the starter has cooled, you add your yeast, cap (but having a way for CO2 to escape, of course), then wait at least 12 hours. You’ll have a vigorous fermentation underway, and you’ll be ready pitch the entire starter into your wort.

Additionally, I’m taking a different approach to the actual boil. Rather than boiling part of the five gallons of water, I’ve boiled all of it. For that, I now have a thirty quart kettle that has the capacity  I need. This introduces a dilly of a pickle: how can I safely and quickly bring down the temperature of five gallons of boiling wort?

A wort chiller! The idea is brilliant: run cold water in a closed loop through the hot wort. It extracts heat as it goes, and in fifteen minutes, your wort has gone from boiling to pitchable. Since the cold water never touches your wort, you never have to worry about contamination, and the quick turnaround minimizes the chances of random infection. It’s colossally easy, and I feel stupid for not having gotten a chiller sooner.

The final addition comes into play during fermentation: brewing an imperial stout or another high-alcohol, high-gravity beer requires what’s known as a two-stage fermentation. Essentially, the beer takes several months to fully ferment, but if you were to leave it in its original fermenter for that time, you’d wind up with a pretty disgusting beer. Why? Because of yeast.

See, yeast can only ferment so much delicious, sweet wort before they, well, die. Actually, they go comatose before they die, but for our purposes, it’s the same thing. When the yeast dies, it settles to the bottom of the vessel, forming a layer of sediment. Anyone who has had a hefeweizen in the bottle has seen phenomenon. The problem, then, is when these hundreds of billions of dead yeast cells sit on the bottom of a fermenter for months, or rather, when the beer sits on top of them for months. Their little decaying yeast bodies release all sorts of chemicals, ruining the flavor of beer. Thus, we need to get the beer off that bed of dead yeast and into what’s known as a secondary fermenter.

The idea is to allow the small amount of yeast still alive in the mostly-fermented beer to continue their task at a comparative snail’s pace. This tends to mellow out the beer, rounding out its flavor profile. Over a period of two to twelve months, depending on the particular style, it undergoes a period of maturation that would be impossible while sitting on a pile of slaughtered yeast effluent.

To that end, I have a glass carboy at the ready. In two weeks’ time, I will transfer The Lusty Owauku from my plastic bukkit to the glass carboy, where it will sit until sometime in February of 2012. Then it goes into bottles, and perhaps by the end of March, it will be ready to drink.

Fuck, that is a long time to wait. But, as a fan and friend of the precocious Sam Sykes, I know my efforts will be appreciated. Some time next spring, I will pour him a goblet of The Lusty Owauku. He will sniff it suspiciously, as his paranoia is boundless, but he will drink all the same. He will pause to savor it, nod sagely, and bestow me with a small, but knowing smile.

“John,” he will say, “you have done well.”

Then he will punch me in the mouth and make obscene gestures at my supine, twitching form. And that’s how I–no, how we all–will know that The Lusty Owauku has properly honored Sam Sykes and his literary creation.

What is The Lusty Owauku?

“I’d say it’s fermented something, blended with the finest I-don’t-want-to-know and aged for exactly who-gives-a-damn-you-stupid-tit.”

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been researching for The Lusty Owauku, trying to nail down exactly what I want to do with this beer. I’ve explored many avenues, because, well, I want to get this right.

Now, I said that I’d have my ingredient list ready. I’ve gone one better: I have three lists ready.

My baseline for this beer will be Northern Brewer’s Imperial Stout Extract Kit. This is, as it stands, a monstrous beer recipe. Using a beer recipe calculator, the standard recipe produces a beer with 8.8% alcohol! That’s twice as strong as anything I have yet brewed. But, why settle for a run-of-the-mill imperial stout? We want to make The Lusty Owauku stand out!

So, let’s add a bunch of crap to it and see what happens.

My original notion for this beer was to add some heat. Imperial stouts are syrupy-sweet, usually, so they should lend themselves well to adding a bit of heat. It is also my hope that the heat will complement the hop flavor in this beer, but who the hell knows, right?

So, the plan will be to add a single Habanero pepper to the recipe. Specifically, it will be halved and seeded, at added to the beer for the last five days of fermentation. Alcohol actually helps extract the various scorching hot oils from the pepper, meaning that the longer it sits, the hotter the beer gets. Posts I’ve read on the interwebs suggest that you leave the pepper in for no longer than a week, lest you make your beer intolerably hot.

And, were I to leave it at that, I’d have a pretty awesome beer, I’d think. A Habanero-infused imperial stout sounds like one of those weird specialty beers for which you’d expect to pay twelve bucks a bottle. But, god dang it, it just needs more.

Northern Brewer has something interesting on their front page: rye malt extract. Making beer with rye is similar to making beer with wheat, in that both tend to contribute spritzy, spicy flavors–though rye is said to be a little earthier overall.

You can predict where this is heading.

So the first thing I decided to find out was if anyone, anywhere, had ever made a stout with rye. As it turns out, yes. And Bell’s brewery is perhaps the best beer I can’t get here in New Jersey, so I figure we’re good to go on that end. It’s not an imperial stout, but we’re certainly not in totally uncharted waters.

This raises the final problem: do I substitute the rye malt for some of the dark malt, or do I just add it? In the case of the former, the beer recipe calculator suggests that such would raise the final alcohol content up to perhaps 9%. Impressive, but will it upset the balance of the beer? Remember, imperial stouts are strongly hopped, in absolute terms. You just tend not to notice it, as the malts are so dominating.

So, we come to the final possible case: simply add 3.3 pounds of rye malt extract on top of the 12 pounds of dark malt extract and the specialty grains. Doing so results in an astonishing 10.4% alcohol by volume, according to the beer calculator. Surely, that is enough to best even the mighty Sam Sykes? It also, I suspect, upsets the final balance of the beer to the malty, perhaps irredeemably so. Accordingly, I plan on adding up to another half ounce of boiling hops to manage this monster–the final amount will depend on how much water I use in the boil, but we’ll talk about that in more depth in an upcoming post.

So, the final recipe for The Lusty Owauku is:

• 12 lb Dark Malt Extract Syrup
• 3.3 lb Rye Malt Extract Syrup
• 0.5 lb Black Patent Malt
• 0.5 lb Chocolate Malt
• 0.5 lb Roasted Barley
• Up to 2.5 Oz Summit hops (boil)
• 2 Oz Cascade Hops (finishing)
• 1 halved and seeded Habanero pepper (last 5 days of fermentation)

The fermentation process will take approximately 4 months. I plan on leaving the beer bottled for 4 weeks before trying, so total time from boil to glass is about 5 months. For a high-alcohol beer like this one, that’s perfectly reasonable and acceptable. In theory, if there’s no contamination or such, and the bottles are stored in a cool, dry, dark place, this beer could last several years.

But, of course, that kind of defeats the purpose, now doesn’t it? Regardless, we have our recipe. Up next, we shall examine the additional equipment I’m going to use to bring The Lusty Owauku to life.

The Lusty Owauku: A Beginning

So this next series of blog posts will be devoted to a long-term homebrew project that I’ll be tackling over the next few months. I’ll be trying out some new stuff, brewing a more difficult style of beer, and generally being more experimental with my homebrewing. Hopefully, it doesn’t end in disaster. But, like the Mythbusters say, failure is always an option.

Shockingly, I have a friend. This friend, a certain Sam Sykes, is a fantasy author of world renown. If you haven’t heard of him, well, that’s your fault, not mine. Why not go to his website and read all about him? Go ahead on, I’ll wait.

At any rate, Sam’s in the midst of writing his third book, titled The Skybound Sea, and as a great fan of his, I want to acknowledge his accomplishment by brewing a celebratory batch of beer. It’s like baking a cake, except you can drink this cake…huh?

When I told Sam about my plans, I also asked him what style of beer he would like. It would do me little good to brew him, say, a Saison, only to discover that he hates all things Belgian. But Sam, being the larger-than-life sort, instead gave me free rein. His only guidance was the name of this celebratory beer:

The Lusty Owauku.

Some would call that a cop-out. Others would stare blankly, without comprehension. Still others might roll their eyes, presume casual dismissal of a friendly gesture, and never brew the beer. Those people do not know Sam. I know Sam. In naming the beer, he has trusted me to do the right thing. Moreover, he has explained, as succinctly as he could, what kind of beer he wants.

In those three words, he has said, “John, I want you to make a beer that captures the essence of a lecherous, drunken, island-dwelling lizard.”

He wants The Lusty Owauku.

Let’s delve into the warped mind of Sam Sykes and break apart his request. We shall start first with the nonsense word: owauku. The Owauku are, in Sam’s books, a species of seemingly jolly, gregarious lizard-men, dwelling on remote tropical islands. They are eager to trade with humans and have done so in the past. Generous with their guests, they usually offer up copious amounts of alcohol and food, taking only the pants of their new friends. They’re probably the least insidious creatures he’s dreamed up in his novels.

With that in mind, consider lusty. Sure, it may conjure up all sorts of titillating images (you pervert), but we should consider its broader context. Despite their panteloniokleptomania, they’re not particularly interested in getting down and dirty with mammals. Instead, the lust of the Owauku is their nihilistic tendency to feast, gamble, get hammered, gamble some more, feast, boot and rally, play Thumper for three hours, and finally pass out around dawn.

So, having deduced all that, I can start making a beer. First, I asked myself: what kind of beer does a lizard dude drink? A perfectly normal, reasonable question. Well, if anything, it’s going to be the beer that humans brought to their islands in trade. So, what beers are humans brewing for export? This is a fantasy setting, so there’s no refrigeration, meaning that most types of beer are flat-out; they’ll go bad too quickly, especially in hot climates.

That leaves us with a couple of options: an imperial stout, or an imperial pale ale.

Why those? Because those styles are high in alcohol and high in hop content, both of which lend themselves to preserving beer for a long time. A beer brewed to the strength of an IPA or imperial stout can be stored for a year or more with no appreciable loss in quality. These beers were brewed to survive long sea voyages, just like those presumably undertaken by the human traders visiting the Owauku.

Now, since the Owauku are lizard-men and colossal drunks, they’re not just gonna wait around for the next human ship to show up with more beer. Hell no, they’ll make their own! And they’ll try to copy the style of the original as much as possible, allowing for, of course, minor differences in ingredients, perhaps including those more suitable to the palette of four-foot tall, googly-eyed lizard.

So, I have decided: The Lusty Owauku will be an imperial stout. I’ve always wanted to brew a massive beer like that, and with ample lead time, I’ll have an excellent beer ready for the debut of Sam’s third book. But I’m not finished there! I’m going to build upon this recipe and add all sorts of improbable ingredients. Right now, the leading addition I’m looking into is Habanero peppers.

But we’ll examine that particular insanity next time, when I have a finalized ingredient list for The Lusty Owauku.

Made a Blue

I have screwed up for the first time in making homebrew. We have a gusher.

Well, we almost had a gusher. With our most recent batch of Aussie Light Ale, everything proceeded well enough through fermentation and bottling. When it came time to try a bottle to test its carbonation, a mere week after bottling, the cap almost flew off. Uh oh, I recall thinking. As I poured the beer into a class, a rich head formed. A very rich head. Way too large for single week of bottle conditioning.

I tasted the beer, and it was great. It had a creamy mouthfeel and the flavor profile was right where I expected it. But there was, undeniably, a problem: the beer was overcarbonated.

My trusty book on beer says that overcarbonation can have a few causes. If your beer is overcarbonated and it tastes funky, it’s due to an infection by bacteria or wild yeast. Evidence of this infection can also manifest itself in a visible ring around the neck of the bottle.

Fortunately, there are no off flavors in this batch of beer. The reason for overcarbonation is that, during bottling, we somehow agitated the beer, thus activating more yeast than normal, causing a more rapid consumption of the remaining fermentables. I have no doubt that, if I left the beer at room temperature for another few weeks, I would indeed have had exploding bottles.

But, recognizing a potential problem, I quickly refrigerated the entire batch. Since Aussie Light Ale is, well, an ale, its yeast work best at room temperatures. In a fridge, at 36 degrees, they quickly go dormant. Thus the fermentation taking place will stop, and the level of carbonation in the bottles will remain stable.

And it’s worked. No bottles have exploded, and the beer tastes great. In fact, when poured into a glass, I would say that this batch of Aussie Light Ale has a superior color and clarity when compared to the first batch. Because of the…robust bottle conditioning that took place, there is a greater amount of yeast sediment at the bottom of each bottle, so it’s important to get the beer off the yeast (that is, into a glass) to really enjoy it. Straight out of the bottle, the yeast tends to dominate the palette.

So, I managed to mess up, but in the end, the beer didn’t really suffer. I was fortunate that my overcarbonation didn’t occur because of an infection, as the off flavors that such would introduce would probably make the beer rather disgusting. By identifying the problem quickly, I was able to nip it in the bud, ensuring that I’d be able to enjoy my beer, rather than mop it up off the floor when the bottles exploded.

Homebrew Review: American Wheat Beer

The third homebrew batch we brewed, the American Wheat Beer, is your basic wheat ale, with the addition of some burly American hops to give it a more robust finish than, say, a Belgian witbier or a hefeweizen. It’s designed to be a summery beer, refreshing and easy to drink, which is good, because it’s still frigging hot around here.

I got this kit from Northern Brewer. It’s a very basic recipe, with no specialty grains (all fermentables are in the form of malt extract), meaning this is about as simple a beer kit as you can get–excluding, of course, the no-boil, prehopped kits. This is both a boon and a detriment, I think. It’s good because it makes boiling your wort that much simpler: no temperature control for steeping the grains means you can be done that much quicker, and with less mess. The downside, and this is no disparagement against Northern Brewer, is that the final beer loses a lot of complexity that the specialty grains add to it.

I should also point out, however, that I’m a novice homebrewer. If something comes out wrong, dollars to donuts it’s my fault. Still, I can’t help but note that this beer lacks a certain freshness that the other recipes(ones with specialty grains) had. But I’m getting ahead of myself; let’s run this bad boy down.

The beer pours a light amber–much darker than is suggested in the picture on the website. I am sure this is due to the fact that I don’t do a five gallon boil. I only boil up 1.5-2 gallons of water when making wort. Head retention is respectable, and the aroma is a combination of wheat and peppery, spicy hops. Neither is hugely strong, of course, and calling hops spicy or peppery is just how I describe most American hops.

The flavor is slightly sweet and wheaty-grassy at first. While my finishing gravity shows that fermentation completed within the expected range for this beer, I wonder if the sweetness is due to left-over, unfermented sugars, or if that is indeed desirable. It does taste good, so I figure, no harm, no foul. The finish is clean and spritzy, the hops again being the chief player, though not in an overwhelming way.

I would say that the best thing this beer has going for it is drinkability. It’s pretty inoffensive and refreshing, and according to my calculations, low enough alcohol that you put a beer or three away without getting hammered. It’s a good summer beer, but I think it could stand to have a few additions made to its recipe. Reviewers speak of adding fruit flavors, orange peel, or spices of some variety.

In this regard, the recipe is a worthy buy because it gives you a solid baseline to experiment. You can count on it to be, well, run-of-the-mill, so that you can confirm that your additions improved the overall experience without wondering about its underlying complexities. I know it seems like a backhanded compliment, but homebrewing is an act of creation. Providing the homebrewer with a reliable underpinning encourages him to innovate, and, in turn, create some truly unique and remarkable beer.

Final verdict? On its own, the American Wheat Beer is good, but not great. I’d brew this again, but only with significant additions/substitutions. Perhaps then this beer would indeed be great. Or even GRRRRRREAT!

That’s right, I went there.

Homebrew Review: Aussie Light Ale

I had an idea going into my second batch of homebrew: since I now understood, from experience, that it’s a minimum of four weeks to get a solid, drinkable beer, I should brew for the situation as it would be when the beer was ready, not as it was at that moment. I think that’s where the Wildfire Red fell down a bit; we brewed it in late March, so the weather was trending towards warm by the time it was ready to drink, and by Memorial Day, it was out of its season, so speak. As I’ve said, I believe that beer is a seasonal affair–massive bocks and stouts for the cold months, and lighter ales and lagers for the warm.

With this in mind, my wife selected a supposedly refreshing beer for our second batch: Aussie Light Ale. Described as a lawnmower beer, we were slated to brew it in the middle of May, thus meaning it would be nearly summer and thus the ideal season before it was ready to drink. So, we brewed on May 22nd, bottled on June 5th, and a day or two before the solstice, it was ready.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Despite this being the second batch of homebrew we’ve ever made, we painted outside the lines. That is to say, we added to the recipe.

You see, as I was getting ready to order the recipe kit, I decided to check out its reviews. What I found was that several reviewers said this beer improved drastically when you added some honey to it at the end of the boil. Feeling emboldened by my earlier success in not ruining five gallons of beer, I decided to follow their advice and purchased a pound of honey at the grocery store.

I’ve since done some reading about honey and beer, and I’ve found out some interesting things. Honey is, as we know, mainly sugar. The sugar in honey is fermentable by yeast, and most of it ferments out (that is, 95% or so of the sugar in honey is consumed by the yeast), so adding a pound of honey may not contribute as much flavor as you’d think.

Another fact I learned is that timing is everything, when it comes to honey. If you add honey at the start of your boil, pretty much all of those honey flavors are going to get broken down, leaving you with a lot of extra fermentable sugar, but no extra flavor. You can get more or less the same result by adding an equivalent amount of table sugar. Adding honey at the end of boil, with, say, 15 minutes to go, ensures that your honey will not contaminate your beer with the wild yeasts/bacteria that may be present, but also allows more of the honey flavor to come through. Again, ‘more’ is relative here–a pound of honey is a drop in the bucket in a five gallon batch of homebrew.

At any rate, I added the pound of honey when there were about 10-15 minutes left the boil. The immediate effect of this was that it raised the specific gravity of the wort a fair amount, thus netting the beer a bit more alcohol than it would otherwise have.

So, after two weeks of fermenting and two weeks in the bottles, the beer was finally ready. My wife an I had returned from some outing one night, and on a lark, I decided to give a bottle a taste. I had previously sampled the beer before it had conditioned, of course, but this is just to test it for off flavors that could signal bacterial or other contamination. An unconditioned sample of homebrew will give you a basic idea of what to expect, but the flavors refine themselves pretty significantly during those two weeks of bottle conditioning.

I poured myself a pint from one of the big bottles. The Aussie Light Ale, as you might expect, has a light golden-orangey color, with just a teensy bit of cloudiness(this haze may not be intentional, and may be due to the honey addition. It doesn’t affect the overall experience). There is a touch of sweetness in the aroma, as well as a mild touch of hops. This is not a strongly-hopped beer, so that’s to be expected. The initial taste is well-balanced, the grains and malt being present, but not overpowering. The honey adds a very subtle undercurrent of sweetness, and this tempers the bitterness of the hops, which are not particularly strong, anyway. The finish is clean, crisp, and slightly sweet–this beer is refreshing and easily drinkable; it is an excellent summer beer.

The Wildfire Red, our first batch, lasted us nearly two months, because my wife didn’t like it. The Aussie Light Ale, on the other hand, was nearly all gone after the Fourth of July. Our friends found it delightfully drinkable; it went well with BBQ fare, or just on its own. It does not overwhelm–it just tastes good.

When we saw how fast this batch of homebrew dwindled, we realized that we needed to accelerate our process. To that end, we brewed our third batch two weeks ago, and it went into bottles today. My sampling indicated that all went well during fermentation, but we’ll have to see how it shakes out in two more weeks. In the mean time, we’re planning to brew up another batch of Aussie Light Ale shortly, so that we have it carry us through the bulk of August.

What then? Why, we’ll have to plan to brew a beer for autumn, of course!

Homebrew Review: Wildfire Red Ale

When I took my first tentative steps into the world of homebrewing, I was convinced I’d screw up so badly that I’d never try again. I was, however, ultimately successful: I turned stuff into beer.

With the first batch now a memory, I thought I’d give it a proper review. Maybe it’s silly to review homebrew, since it’s not like one could go to a store and buy it, but one could certainly brew it. Or something close enough to to it, anyway.

Wildfire Red is aptly named. First, because it’s indeed a red ale, but also because of its toasty malt character. It’s an extract kit with specialty grains included, and these specialty grains are what give the beer its roasted flavor. In my wife’s opinion, it’s too much, but I think it toes the line well.

So, the beer pours a rich amber-red with a nice, creamy, frothy head. It has medium to medium-light body, but it’s quite big on flavor. You get an initial blast of the roasted malt, followed by a nice even layer of the fine British hops. The finish, however, is the roasted malt again, which lingers on your palette. Were it not for this roasted malt aftertaste, this beer would be eminently drinkable, as the malt and hops balance each other out very well. But, in my batch, either because I steeped the grains too long, scorched them, or whatever, it’s a little overwhelming to drink a bunch of this beer. I will say that it does pair extremely well with grilled meats, be it chicken, fish, or steak.

In all, I’d say the recipe is excellent, but that my execution might have been slightly off. A friend who sampled the beer was reminded of oversteeped tea, when commenting on the beer’s finish. I’m inclined to agree with him, though I’m not a tea drinker. Were I to brew this again, I’d only steep the grains for fifteen minutes instead of thirty. I might also look for some way to mellow out the roasted malt character, perhaps with different hops. But in reality, there are so many established homebrew recipes that there’s really no reason to go back to the same one, unless you think it’s the best beer you’ve ever had. So, I’ll grant this one a rating of A-OK! and move on to the next recipe.

Actually, I’ve already brewed and bottled my second batch, but have yet to try it. We’ll see how it ultimately turns out in a couple of weeks, after it’s conditioned and matured.

Bottles, No Cans

So just clap your hands.

The homebrew adventure finishes today with the most exciting, suspenseful task: bottling. Actually, it’s tedious and messy.

As you know, I have a kegerator. When making this batch of homebrew, I thought to myself, “Say, what if I were to keg my batch of beer? Why, I’d show them! I’d show them all!” Then I laughed maniacally for a while. But then I did some research.

Commercial breweries use specialized kegging equipment designed to rapidly transfer beer from their giant holding tanks to the kegs. It makes sense when you’re brewing thousands of gallons of beer at a go. Unfortunately, this is not really suitable for the hombrewer. What is, however, is something called a corny keg.

In essence, corny kegs are five-gallon kegs used by the soft drink industry to store concentrated syrup for soda fountains. The idea is to maximize the amount of important product (the soda) that you’re selling to the restaurant or whatever, and let them provide the necessary amount of water and carbonation to make the finish product. As it turns out, these kegs are easily disassembled for cleaning. As we know, cleanliness is next to beer godliness, so the corny keg is the natural choice for the homebrewer.

But, unfortunately, it’s not that easy. The connectors for the CO2 and liquid are nothing like those on commercial kegs. If you have a commercial kegerator, your current equipment is incompatible. Frowny face. Fortunately, adapters are made with this very problem in mind, so it is possible to convert your kegerator to accept corny kegs.

Naturally, this was the way I wanted to go. I got the keg, I got the adapters, I was all ready to go. Unfortunately, my keg reeked of Mountain Dew and needed some new seals and o-rings, none of which I were available to me. So I cut my losses and got bottles.

The nice thing was that I had all the equipment for bottling ready to go, so, after eleven days in the fermenter, my wife and I decided it was time. I began by sanitizing all of my gear: the bottling bucket, the transfer hose, the spigot, the bottling wand, the ladle used for sampling, and so on.

My wife boiled a bit of water and added priming sugar  to it, stirring to dissolve. The point behind this is to provide your yeast with something to eat while it sits in the bottle. This went into the bottling bucket, ready to mix with the proto-beer. This will allow the beer, in its bottles, to carbonate over the period of, say two weeks.

Homebrewing is for the patient, indeed.

Once the beer was transferred to the bottling bucket, I cleaned the fermenter and sanitized it, at the same time using it to sanitize my bottles. This is one of many methods you can use to sanitize your bottles; another I’ve heard is to run them in the dishwasher without detergent and let the heat do the job. This, of course, presumes that you’ve already cleaned the bottles, meaning that you’ve removed any gunk, goo, or spielkus from them.

My wife and I set up an assembly line of sorts. I handed her a sanitized and rinsed bottle, she filled and capped it. The whole procedure, including setup and cleanup took about an hour and a half. When we were done, we had 23.5  22-oz. bottles filled with our infant beer.

We then waited a week and tried a bottle. It was carbonated, which was a good sign. It didn’t taste very good, though, which had me concerned. But I soon learned that patience is indeed a virtue, and five weeks after bottling, I can say with certainty that the beer is well-carbonated, mature, and delicious.

So my first foray in the homebrewing was a success. In all, it wasn’t too hard. As long as you make sure to clean and sanitize all of your equipment, mind the directions that come with your beer recipe, use a little common sense, and have some patience, you’ll be fine. Your beer will be your beer. Like a chef admiring a culinary masterpiece, so too will you swell with pride when you receive complements on your tasty homebrew.

What Is Best In Life?

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the fermentation of your homebrew.

Now that I’ve made you cringe, I can continue with the tale of the homebrew ale. When we last left off, our wort was boiled and ready to go into the fermenter. There are two common containers used as fermenters in homebrew: a food-grade plastic bucket, and a glass carboy(looks like a water cooler jug). In our case, I has a bukkit. It’s not a matter of personal preference or better performance, it’s just what the kit came with.

Now, a typical batch of homebrew will ultimately wind up being about 5 gallons of beer. That’s what the ingredients of the recipe expect. Unless you have a massive stainless steel pot, you won’t have all five gallons of water boiling. So, what to do? Well, in my case, I boiled  1.5 gallons of water to make my wort. When it came time to add said water to the fermenter(mah bukkit, you’ll recall), I first pour the remaining 3.5 gallons of untouched water lustily into it. Why lustily? Well, the yeasty beasties which are going to be doing the actual fermentation need well-oxygenated water to kick-start the process. So, when pouring, don’t be afraid to splash. This is the best way to give your little buddies a leg up.

So, 3.5 gallons of cold, agitated water is sitting in my nice, sanitized fermenter. It’s now time to add my boiling hot wort. I pour this in through a strainer, as I don’t particularly want the hops and few spent grains in the wort to sit in my proto-beer for two weeks. Allegedly, they can contribute gross and yucky flavors. I don’t know, because I made damn sure they were all strained out. I also made sure that my strainer had been sanitized before use.

Now my wort is complete. Taking its temperature with a sanitized thermometer, I learned that it was 81 degrees. My instructions say to add the yeast at 75 degrees, so I can take this time to measure the specific gravity of my wort. The books say this is important, because it lets you figure out how much alcohol your finished beer has(you take a post-fermentation reading). It’ll also let you know if you screwed something up. Using a sanitized ladle, I take a sample of my beer, put it in a graduated cylinder, and drop in the specific gravity reader thingy. Since it’s calibrated for a liquid that’s 60 degrees, and mine is roughly 80, I make the necessary adjustments when I calculate the initial specific gravity, but I have my reading.

I throw out the sample. Small price to pay.

So now I have little to do but wait for the liquid to cool off. I cover it to prevent too many wild critters from floating down into the fermenter, pass a half hour or so, then come back. It’s time to pitch the yeast.

It’s also not very momentous. You tear open the little packet that came with your recipe kit and dump them in. Then, you seal the fermenter.

One thing that is important, though, is your fermentation lock. It’s this little plastic dealy that allows the carbon dioxide your yeast produces to escape, thus preventing a hilarious explosion of half-fermented beer, no doubt. I also prevents air from getting in and spoiling things by keeping a layer of water between the two. Sounds strange, but when you see it in action, you totally get how and why it works.

So, with the wort sealed away, I tuck the bukkit into a quiet corner of our dining room, which is most thermodynamically stable room in our house. There it sits for the next eleven days, untouched but not unnoticed, the fermentation lock vigorously bubbling for the first seven of them.

Then it was time to bottle. Oy. Vey.