Ok. First off I bottled the Apple Cider. I took a gravity reading and it read 1.014. Now I went back through the posts and I could not find where I had captured the OG. I remember it being quite high. I think it was 1.080+. So, let's go with that. This leads to a ABV of 8.6%. Honestly, it could have been 1.090 which would give an ABV of 10%. I'm sure the gravity finished at 1.014 because the alcohol killed the poor yeast. Damn, that is high.
I tried a little bit of that sample and it tasted to me tart. Similar to wine. In fact I would say that this could be described as an apple wine. Now wonder the Germans called this Apfelwein.
Anyhow now comes the dilemma. To carb or not to carb. I bottled three without carbonation and then poured a sugar solution into the bottling bucket and got five more bottles out of it. So we'll see. I quickly put one of the un-carbonated bottles into the fridge and I plan to bust it out for the family reunion.
Onto the bitter. Let me start by saying this beer scared me a bit. After a day or so I saw some activity in the fermenter but not very much. I should add that the fermentation fridge was kept low (about 67F) and that is the lowest I've had it yet so that maybe what I'm seeing. There was almost no krausen on the top. The fermenter was churning like a boss so I figured to leave it. Also, the air lock was not very active either. All this worried me quite a bit. So, on Wednesday I took a sample.
The sample looked nice. This Bitter has a very pleasant color. I took a gravity reading and it measured out at 1.018. I felt much better at this point since I was sure now that the yeast had done work and had produced alcohol. That is assuming it wasn't infected which I determined next by drinking the sample. And it tasted like...beer. So again, crisis averted, everything appeared to be fine. In fact it tasted good enough that roommate Clare was ready to drink it as-is.
Fast forward to yesterday and I am getting ready to transfer to the keg and I take a sample. The gravity read 1.016. That is much higher that I thought. The mash temp was low (about 150F) and I expected it to ferment to a much lower gravity. Maybe the yeast wasn't as healthy as I had thought. I did travel via UPS through the California desert in late May. I don't know. I need a microbiological lab and a biologist in here to access these yeast. Until that happens I guess I get what I get. I sampled the brew and it tasted bitter. Maybe too bitter. I may have to let it sit for a awhile to mellow out. Probably not though. I'll likely leave it for another week and when it's chilled and carbed I'll likely drink it till it's gone. Aging be damned.
Anyhow, the 1.016 gravity gives the beer a finals ABV of 4.7%.
No more plans for additional brews right now. Stay posted for Best Bitter tasting updates though.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Best Bitter
For my first 5 gallon all grain batch I ordered up the Best Bitter from MoreBeer. Ingredients are as follows:
9lbs. British Pale
0.5lbs. Carastan
1oz Kent Goldings - 7.2% AA - 60 minutes
1.5oz Northern Brewer - Two bags of hops to make this. The 0.5oz was 8.5% AA and the 1oz was 7.9% AA - 5 minutes
1 oz Kent Goldings - 7.2% AA - 1 minute
All right so let's talk about what went down. I should have bought one of those classy programs like Beer Smith to help me determine how much water to use. I just saw somewheres on the interwebs that for 11lbs of grain you can assume 1 gallon of absorption by the grain. So I planned to use 4 gallons of strike water followed by 3 gallons for a batch sparge. My hope was that this would yield 6 gallons of wort.
Next problem, how hot should the water be. At the time I started this mash I had no idea why someone would mash at 145F vs 165F. I've since learned but I was just hoping to get something fermentable at this point. Internet says anything around 152F will work. Ok internet. We'll see. So, how hot should the water be? Again Beer Smith would have worked like a champ here. I'm thinking there's a lesson learned here. The grains where in the fridge for the last couple of days. I took them out a couple of hours before brewing to warm up some. I didn't bother to take a temp reading of the grain and do math and stuff. In the end I decided to heat the water up to 165F and put it in my mash tun to warm it up.
I was in the mash tun for a few minutes when it occurred to me that when I open the spout on this thing it should be a couple of feet of off the ground, not on the ground as it was at the moment. So, with four gallons of water in it, I lifted the whole mash tun up and put it on a coffee table that was hanging out in the garage. Well, right after I did that I guess gravity decided to be different enough that the mash tun began to leak. Great! :(
This is what failure looks like:
Ok. So now I add the grain to the mash mix it up as best I can and the temp measures 150F. Seems good enough to me let's do it. I close the lid and let it be for 1 hour. Towards the end of the hour I heat up 3 gallons more of water. I heated it up to 170F and now I run into a problem. I don't have an extra pot/bucket/container whatever. So now we have a logistics problem. I have my sparge water in my boil kettle. What do I collect the current wort into? With the help of Ellie and her sister we get every pot in the house and fill them up with sparge water from the boil kettle.
Vorlauf time. After about half a gallon pitcher the wort looks good to me. So, I poured the pitcher back onto the grain bed and empty the wort into a pitcher in what I think it 1 gallon at a time. How much did I get? I think 3 gallons Beats the hell out of me. I need to get some kind of measuring stick for the boiling pot. At this point I'm really starting the stress out since my sparge water has just been sitting in pots the past 5 minutes and it's cooling down more and more by the minute. I think I need to get a another bucket and gather the wort up that way.
Anyhow, we get the mash tun reasonably empty and fill up with with our sparge water and mix it up. Ellie wanted to mix the bejeezus out of it which just cools it even more. I told her to ease up but she really really wanted to stir that grain bed up. We closed the lid and left it for another ten minutes. During that time we sampled the first runnings. I was warm and delicious and sweet. Wonderful.
Now we empty the mash tun using the 1 gallon pitcher same as the first time. Here's a pic of the very last of the second runnings.
Here's what the boil kettle looks like:
That looks like less than 6 gallons to me. But I can't be sure as I have never really paid attention to what six gallons looks like and I don't have a measuring stick or anything. Also, since I use this pot to heat up the sparge water, I'm clearly not heating up anymore with this pot.
Here's a pic of the spent grain at this point:
It was around this point that the new roommate asked what one could do with spent grain. I told her you could all kinds of things with it just consult the internet. So she did. And am I glad she did. Now I've got barley breakfast bars, barley bread, even some barley balls that went with spaghetti that night. Nice!
Ellie was a peach and cleaned up the mash tun for me while I commenced to brewing. Everything else was pretty much the same as always. However, as suspected, we ended up with less than five gallons when all was said and done. I would estimate it closer to 4-4.5 gallons. Here's a pic of the final result:
One interesting note. I found the best way to clean all the gear after brewing was to use the garden hose instead of the kitchen sink. That garden hose sprays the equipment clean like a boss and since I have it out and about for the wort chiller we might as well use it.
9lbs. British Pale
0.5lbs. Carastan
1oz Kent Goldings - 7.2% AA - 60 minutes
1.5oz Northern Brewer - Two bags of hops to make this. The 0.5oz was 8.5% AA and the 1oz was 7.9% AA - 5 minutes
1 oz Kent Goldings - 7.2% AA - 1 minute
All right so let's talk about what went down. I should have bought one of those classy programs like Beer Smith to help me determine how much water to use. I just saw somewheres on the interwebs that for 11lbs of grain you can assume 1 gallon of absorption by the grain. So I planned to use 4 gallons of strike water followed by 3 gallons for a batch sparge. My hope was that this would yield 6 gallons of wort.
Next problem, how hot should the water be. At the time I started this mash I had no idea why someone would mash at 145F vs 165F. I've since learned but I was just hoping to get something fermentable at this point. Internet says anything around 152F will work. Ok internet. We'll see. So, how hot should the water be? Again Beer Smith would have worked like a champ here. I'm thinking there's a lesson learned here. The grains where in the fridge for the last couple of days. I took them out a couple of hours before brewing to warm up some. I didn't bother to take a temp reading of the grain and do math and stuff. In the end I decided to heat the water up to 165F and put it in my mash tun to warm it up.
I was in the mash tun for a few minutes when it occurred to me that when I open the spout on this thing it should be a couple of feet of off the ground, not on the ground as it was at the moment. So, with four gallons of water in it, I lifted the whole mash tun up and put it on a coffee table that was hanging out in the garage. Well, right after I did that I guess gravity decided to be different enough that the mash tun began to leak. Great! :(
This is what failure looks like:
So now I pour all the water back into my boil kettle and take the mash tun to the kitchen to tighten everything down. Then back to the garage to heat up the water again to 165F and pour into the mash tun. Right away leakage. It wasn't bad. Maybe a drop every 10 seconds. I figure I'll just put that the pitcher under it and move on. For sure, I will put more love into this mash tun before next time.
Ok. So now I add the grain to the mash mix it up as best I can and the temp measures 150F. Seems good enough to me let's do it. I close the lid and let it be for 1 hour. Towards the end of the hour I heat up 3 gallons more of water. I heated it up to 170F and now I run into a problem. I don't have an extra pot/bucket/container whatever. So now we have a logistics problem. I have my sparge water in my boil kettle. What do I collect the current wort into? With the help of Ellie and her sister we get every pot in the house and fill them up with sparge water from the boil kettle.
Vorlauf time. After about half a gallon pitcher the wort looks good to me. So, I poured the pitcher back onto the grain bed and empty the wort into a pitcher in what I think it 1 gallon at a time. How much did I get? I think 3 gallons Beats the hell out of me. I need to get some kind of measuring stick for the boiling pot. At this point I'm really starting the stress out since my sparge water has just been sitting in pots the past 5 minutes and it's cooling down more and more by the minute. I think I need to get a another bucket and gather the wort up that way.
Anyhow, we get the mash tun reasonably empty and fill up with with our sparge water and mix it up. Ellie wanted to mix the bejeezus out of it which just cools it even more. I told her to ease up but she really really wanted to stir that grain bed up. We closed the lid and left it for another ten minutes. During that time we sampled the first runnings. I was warm and delicious and sweet. Wonderful.
Now we empty the mash tun using the 1 gallon pitcher same as the first time. Here's a pic of the very last of the second runnings.
Here's what the boil kettle looks like:
That looks like less than 6 gallons to me. But I can't be sure as I have never really paid attention to what six gallons looks like and I don't have a measuring stick or anything. Also, since I use this pot to heat up the sparge water, I'm clearly not heating up anymore with this pot.
Here's a pic of the spent grain at this point:
It was around this point that the new roommate asked what one could do with spent grain. I told her you could all kinds of things with it just consult the internet. So she did. And am I glad she did. Now I've got barley breakfast bars, barley bread, even some barley balls that went with spaghetti that night. Nice!
Ellie was a peach and cleaned up the mash tun for me while I commenced to brewing. Everything else was pretty much the same as always. However, as suspected, we ended up with less than five gallons when all was said and done. I would estimate it closer to 4-4.5 gallons. Here's a pic of the final result:
At this point I found the color to be a little darker than I had intended. Also, the OG measured 1.052. The recipe called for 1.042-46. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that it was less than 5 gallons.
One interesting note. I found the best way to clean all the gear after brewing was to use the garden hose instead of the kitchen sink. That garden hose sprays the equipment clean like a boss and since I have it out and about for the wort chiller we might as well use it.
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