Hop Blonde Ale

So Rachel's boyfriend Nate is a biologist, He mentioned he might light to brew one day so I invited him over. Should be fun.

The beer today will be a well hopped blonde kit from MoreBeer.

8lbs American Pale
1lb White Wheat
1lb Crystal 10L
1oz Cascade 4.7%AA @60mins
1oz Willamette 4.8%AA @5mins
1oz Simcoe 13.5%AA @0mins (recipe calls for this to be dry hopped but I'm changind it)

We will be trying a new yeast. GigaYeast Gold Pitch. It was produced on March 12, 2018. It claims there are over 200 billions yeast so you can directly pitch it. No starter required.

We will use 10 gallons of distilled and will add the following brewing salts.

3g Gypsum
6g CaCl
2g Epsom Salt
1g NaCl

This should give Ca:60 Mg:5 SO4:65 Na:10 Cl:92 We will add the brewing salts to the mash and then check the pH and add lactic accordingly.

11:04 - Nate and Rachel running late. I boiled the O2 stone, calibrated the thermometers, and measured out the salts. So far so good.

12:41 - They got here. We're going slow but it's all fun. We're having a good time. Hit my mash temp at 150F. The pH came in at 5.4 which I think is good enough so we will leave it. So far everything is going good.

1:58 - Run off went well. Pre-boil gravity is 1.037.

5:28 - All done. Clacob came over. We sampled the pH beer. More on that in the next post. The biggest snag was that the plate chiller got hooked up backwards. So the wort didn't chill all the way down. Jacob noticed so kudos to him for catching that. Once we found it and got it right then the beer cooled nicely but we had already moved over too much warm beer. So after some deliberation I emptied what was left on the brew kettle into the yard and poured the semi-cooled wort back into the boil kettle and ran it through the chiller again. We got it cooled enough that time. After all that I forgot to take a gravity sample. So we have no idea what the wort tastes like. I would have liked Nate to try it. For the record he didn't like hops. It was funny to watch his reaction. I found enough wort in the kettle to get a sample and check the gravity using the refractometer and it measured in at 1.048 which is right where we were hoping to be. I think that's it. So we'll see.

pH Experiment Prelim Results

I just now moved the pH experiment beer into their bottles for priming. The yeast on the 5.8 looked clumpy. See pic below:

I bottled three from each pH and took a sample from each. 4.5 was awful but Ellie like it best. I thought it was the most estery and sharp. Almost vinegary or solventy. 5.8 wasn't bad. A little estery but not too bad. It was without body, maybe watery. 5.1 is pretty good.

I have not detected my apple ester in any of these to the extent I was expecting. So let's say this, pH matters. A lot! Too high and it's watery. Too low and it's sharp and estery. But it's not my culprit. Which leads me to this thought, I've done slip batches just like this one. Why was this one without that apple ester?

This is the first time I've used Saaz hops. Maybe that matters. I'll try to switch to that and see if it matters going forward.

Something I've been tossing around was that the pitch rate for this batch was the perfect amount. I've always overpitched because I've read that too little yeast causes esters and one thing to do would be to pitch more yeast. So I do. Usually much more. I think our next split batch experiment will be a pitch rate experiment. The best way to do that would be to use dry yeast since I can measure it out better.

Another thing is that they spent the first week in the guest bathtub, not the fermentation chamber. Could the chest freezer just be pissing those yeast off. I don't think so since my split batch O2 test was fermented in the house. Also, I've tried fermenting in a giant coozy in the past just to eliminate the chest freezer variable and got apple ester.

For now I point to pitch rate and test for that soon. I'll try these beers again in a couple of weeks after they have bubbles.