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.
