I'm getting a bad feeling that I'm about to make more apple beer. But here we go anyway. The key thing here will be that I will only supply 20 seconds of O2 from the stone.
8lbs 2row
0.5lbs C15
0.25lbs Oats
1oz Willamette 5.3% AA
WLP001 with starter. 01-01-15. Lot 1010000
Arrowhead spring water
4:13 - Boiling O2 stone now.
4:35 - Done boiling. Got the grain milled. Got the strike pot out and setup. All is going well.
4:54 - Got the strike water in the mash tun. We will see if I hit my strike temp. I'll try for 152 but It's not too important to me.
5:07 - Mashed in around 152F. I burned my hand just a little. The strike temp needed to be 165F and started ar 160F. Usually I pull a gallon out of the mash tun and put it back in the pot, boil it, and add it back. It takes forever. This time I thought I would empty the whole mash tun back into the back and it would take 5 minutes to bump up the temp and we would call it good. There is no good way to pour the water from the Coleman Xtreme without it spilling out. And it was hot!!! Lesson learned. But it did get it heated back up real fast. So I got that going for me. Which is nice. I'm going to grill some fish now.
6:38 - Starting the boil. I added too much sparge water. The pre-boil gravity check was 1.032. Usually I get around 1.040. So lesson learned. Not too much sparge water. So the gravity should come in at 1.040ish. I help back some hops to keep it from being too bitter. The fish was good.
7:10 - I've decided to have a 90min boil. And I decided to add back a little bit of the extra sparge. I collected it in a gallon jug once I started boiling. Maybe it will bump up the gravity a little. This girl came by looking for her dog. I thought she was asking me about my dog so I went in to be sure I could find the snorted one. I figured she would just come and go and I'd never see her again but in a few minutes she comes back and asks for a leash and some water. So I helped her out. We'll see if I get the leash back.
8:59 - Beer is in the fermenter. O2 for 20 seconds. Got to clean up now. Everything went well. No sign of the leash yet. I didn't run the re-circulation pump on the chiller. It stalls often. So I just stirred. It went ok.
9:36 - All done. The beer cooled down to 62F. Colder than I had wanted. Stay tuned and we'll see how it comes out.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Blonde Ale sans O2 stone tasting notes
It tastes bad. It's banana beer. This is an ester produced by yeast. Usually its in hefe and belgium yeasts. Not US-05. So this yeast was very pissed. Just like always. Although usually its ripe apples. So this is a switch. It could be from lack of O2. So too much O2 = apples. Too little O2 = bananas. Maybe. I don't know.
So I'm going to make a new batch today and only hit it with 20 secs of O2 from the stone. Since I'm feeling cynical about it, I doubt it will work. So I need to start thinking of reasons why I'm making bad beer and devise a series of experiments to find out why. I think back to the time I thought I had an infection. That was a good experiment. It chopped out so many variables. I'm going back through old posts and I can't find any info on the results of that experiment. My memory says that they came out the same. That it didn't matter. In that experiment I used all new/clean gear and one batch was exposed to the O2 stone and another was not. This was because I thought that the issue was the O2 stone. And they came out the same. As memory serves.
Today I was planning to change the amount of O2 I put in the wort thinking that I was over oxygenating the wort and that was causing the horrible esters. Now that I think about it, it won't matter. I've got to think of a new experiment. I'll go ahead and do this one just to be sure though.
As of this moment, I'm thinking about what was common throughout all the estery beer. I'm thinking back to the last time I made beer that wasn't estery. It was beer made in the bathtub. No chest freezer. Could the chest freezer be the problem? Maybe its the wild temperature swings in the chest freezer that cause the yeast stress. I have a hard time believing that's the problem. Pro brewers use glycol chillers that contact the fermenting beer at much lower temps than my chest freezer. Also, many brewers on the earth use chest freezers for temp control. I don't hear any of them complaining. The real problem is I can't do this experiment for a few more months. It's a billion degrees in this house and has been since March. The way the weather here is it won't be until November before it's cool enough in the house to do this experiment.
Honestly I getting discouraged. I read the internet daily for posts of people complaining about my issue and smart people who have answers and there are none. I get no help from others. I have no access to brewers elite enough to help me. I went to the homebrew clud in Bakersfield once. That didn't help. All answers are the same answers to the ester problem. Pitch enough healthy yeast. Temperature control. O2. Well I've done all that. What do you do when you've done all the suggestions and you continue to not get results? How many bad batches of beer should I make before the word futility resonates? I don't know but I'm getting really frustrated. If I can't begin to make headway on the ester problem by the end of winter, I may start thinking about calling it quits.
So I'm going to make a new batch today and only hit it with 20 secs of O2 from the stone. Since I'm feeling cynical about it, I doubt it will work. So I need to start thinking of reasons why I'm making bad beer and devise a series of experiments to find out why. I think back to the time I thought I had an infection. That was a good experiment. It chopped out so many variables. I'm going back through old posts and I can't find any info on the results of that experiment. My memory says that they came out the same. That it didn't matter. In that experiment I used all new/clean gear and one batch was exposed to the O2 stone and another was not. This was because I thought that the issue was the O2 stone. And they came out the same. As memory serves.
Today I was planning to change the amount of O2 I put in the wort thinking that I was over oxygenating the wort and that was causing the horrible esters. Now that I think about it, it won't matter. I've got to think of a new experiment. I'll go ahead and do this one just to be sure though.
As of this moment, I'm thinking about what was common throughout all the estery beer. I'm thinking back to the last time I made beer that wasn't estery. It was beer made in the bathtub. No chest freezer. Could the chest freezer be the problem? Maybe its the wild temperature swings in the chest freezer that cause the yeast stress. I have a hard time believing that's the problem. Pro brewers use glycol chillers that contact the fermenting beer at much lower temps than my chest freezer. Also, many brewers on the earth use chest freezers for temp control. I don't hear any of them complaining. The real problem is I can't do this experiment for a few more months. It's a billion degrees in this house and has been since March. The way the weather here is it won't be until November before it's cool enough in the house to do this experiment.
Honestly I getting discouraged. I read the internet daily for posts of people complaining about my issue and smart people who have answers and there are none. I get no help from others. I have no access to brewers elite enough to help me. I went to the homebrew clud in Bakersfield once. That didn't help. All answers are the same answers to the ester problem. Pitch enough healthy yeast. Temperature control. O2. Well I've done all that. What do you do when you've done all the suggestions and you continue to not get results? How many bad batches of beer should I make before the word futility resonates? I don't know but I'm getting really frustrated. If I can't begin to make headway on the ester problem by the end of winter, I may start thinking about calling it quits.
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