Brewing Bday Beer

So, I talked Ellie into brewing her birthday beer with me. We started pretty late. I'd say around 6pm or so. We had "The Other Guys" on DVD and popped that in while we brewed it up.

For the record we brewed a German Hefeweizen from MoreBeer. No steeping grains. The ingredients were:

1. 6lbs Bavarian Wheat extract. Dry.
2. 0.5oz Northern Brewer Hops.

I bought Arrowhead spring water this time instead of Albertson's spring water. I have no idea what the difference in water chemistry is. I think the next time I brew I will put effort into making my water chemistry more ideal. Anyhow, we empty 6 gallons into the brew kettle and then we added the DME (dry malt extract). I heard it was easier to get mixed in when it is cold. This was Ellie's main job this evening. I gave her a stainless spoon and told her that had better not have any lumps. She took to it pretty well. At some point I felt bad for her though and when and got a whisk from the kitchen and joined in. She then told me to try and heat it up a little to see if it was any easier. I didn't think there was difference.

As it was heating up we noticed a lot of protein build up in the kettle. Way more than normal. Must be more proteins in wheat. I told Ellie sometimes people gather up those proteins with the spoon and remove them to help clarification of the beer in the long run. She said to leave it. She likes to idea of proteins. But there got to be so much it was flowing over the kettle. So I got a large plastic bowl and we removed them anyway. So, that's something new we tried.

Once it was boiling we added the hops. I broke off a little of one of the pellets and gave it to her. She spit it out. Then we drank some Tom Kunkel homebrew while we watched the movie. 10 minutes out I added the servomyces and the wort chiller. 5 minutes out we added the whirlfloc.

Then we cooled the wort to 100F with the wort chiller. Same as in the past. I then moved it to the basin. I happened to get a stopper for the basin so there was no longer a need to use a lime. I moved the kettle to the basin and poured 10lbs of ice all around it. I then filled the basin with water to where the wort was in the kettle. We would stir it up every few minutes to help it cool quicker. Once the wort was at 69F we got it off the ice and took a gravity reading. It measured 1.050 which was the estimated gravity so that was good. I then poured the wort into the fermenter and Ellie pitched the yeast.

We made sure to line the chest freezer with a garbage bag in case of a blow off it would be easier to clean. Then we moved the fermenter to the chest freezer and installed the blow off tube. The next day Ellie and I take a look and there was so much pressure in the fermenter that it was pushing the stopper out. I jammed in the fermenter and now I don't think it's going to come out easy but I'll worry about that in a few weeks.

The fermentation the first few days was aggressive to say the least. The amount of CO2 coming out of the thing was scary. I've included some videos to this post that show that off. Thank goodness we installed the blow off tube because the krausen did grow up into the tube. Also, it smelled like bananas. So I guess we will have banana beer.

After three days I pulled out the blow off tube and put in the air lock. That was interesting. The tube was stuck in the stopper and I put my head in the chest freezer to work it out. The entire chest freezer contains a blanket of CO2 and it nearly suffocated me. Kind of scary. I mean if you dropped a small child in there and closed the lid they would die.

The first day or two we kept the chest freezer at 70F and after that we have dropped it to 68F. The while labs yeast vile claimed a temp of 68-72F. MoreBeer documentation suggested 62F. Quite a discrepancy there. Anyhow, here some pics and vids.