Well kiddies now I've bottled the wheat beer and right away I begin brewing the next batch. It's an IPA from Mr. Beer. Again there are two HME cans and no booster of any kind.
Now that I've emptied the fermenter from the wheat beer, I've got to clean it. I opened the lid after bottling the wheat beer and stuck my nose in it. WOW! Difficult to describe. Potent and pungent. Sour a little. Not pleasant.
I spray the inside of the fermenter with tap water until all the yeasty gunk off the bottom was gone. I then unscrewed the spout. After filling the fermenter about a 1/3 full of warm tap water I put in some Oxy Clean. I understand any oxygen base cleaner will work. Hand soap work too. But either way the simpler the better. When you get into anti-bacterial and scented crap then it will leave behind yuckyness and make the beer taste bad later. Also when cleaning you shouldn't use anything abrasive to scratch up the fermenter and create scratches in it that will be a happy place for evil germs. So, I used a paper towel to clean up any yeast and hop residue stuck to the fermenter. Once completely clean, I let it soak in the Oxy Clean for ten minutes before emptying it out and rinsing until clear. Then I dried with a paper towel.
At this point I noticed something interesting. There was some slight damage to the top of the fermenter. When I unscrewed the lid I noticed a chunk of yeast dislodged from the lid. I didn't think anything of it at the time. Now I 'm beginning to put 2 and 2 together and I figure what happened was that when I poured the wort into the fermenter I missed horribly and got wort on the lid, side of the fermenter, everywhere really. When I pitched the yeast some of it must have found its way on the lid. Since there was some delicious wort already on the lid, it went to town and prospered. It continued to grow while eating up that wort to a size that malformed that portion of the lid. Nice little lesson here. Nature is badass. No stinking plastic top is getting in the way of fungi growth. Tell you what.
I stuck my nose in the fermenter and didn't smell anything so I thought we were good to go. I sanitized the fermenter, measuring cup, can opener, and whisk the same as before but this time using tap water.
I then measured out 4 cups of spring water same as before into a pot, boiled it, took it off the heat, and added the HME. This time I made sure to stir as I added the HME. I also tasted it. Still tastes like molasses. And hops. At this point I again craved to somehow make this brew my own. So I added a cup of honey. Honey tastes good compared to HME. I have a feeling raw ingredients are all going to be this way. Anyway, I stirred the honey into the wort.
After the wort was all mixed up I added a gallon of cold spring water to the fermenter and then added the hot wort. I then filled the fermenter up to the 2.5 gallon mark as per the instructions. I mixed it with vigor the aerate and added the same yeast as before. I was careful to get the packets out of the lid before warming it up in hot water.
I wanted to get another batch of beer fermenting quickly (which I will explain in the next post) so I bottled the beer in 7 days. I did my best to empty 5 bottles for the bottling process. This time I used corn sugar (dextrose) for the primer. Same amount as before. This time I sterilized the sugar scooper before use.
After 7 days I chilled a bottle and gave it a try. There was a nice release of CO2. The beer was a darker than the lager. There was a little head. The cidery taste is gone. Since it was an IPA I expected there to be a hoppy taste but what I got was unexpected. It was very bitter. I don't mean pleasant IPA bitter. I don't mean hop head goodness bitter. I mean yucky bitter. Well it is an IPA which mean more hops than normal. But I thought you needed to be particular about the hops you added. It tastes to me like they have a standard hop extract for balance, taste, and aroma and used a ton of that. Hell for all I know they may have just grabbed a bunch of alpha acids from the lab and jammed it in there. See what I did. I interjected some new found knowledge about hops into my blog. Badassness squared. I feel like this IPA is quite potent. Much more so than my wheat beer. I expected them to be the same as I added same amount of fermentables to the wort. The major difference being sucrose and honey. I'll tell you what. That yeast really must like honey because I'm a liter in while writing this an I'm buzzing like a bumble bee. NICE!!! Side note: I should invest in a hydrometer so I can accurately compute the ABV.
Kevin and I will be drinking some of these during playoff tomorrow. But what we don't drink will be conditioned for an extended period of time to see the degree to which that improves the beer. One final note, the bitterness of the beer is less irritating the more of it I drink. Peace out!
Next Post: HME + Steeped Chocolate Stout
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