Tag Archives: #8

All Packed Up

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Our first keg of homebrew kicked last night.  Which was good timing, since we’re leaving the country tomorrow.  I packed up the kegerator and cleaned out the keg today, packing everything away until we get back in June.  There was a minimal amount of swearing and I only cut myself once.

Tomorrow we fly to Amsterdam, for a 5 month sojourn in the Netherlands.  I’m really looking forward to easier access to European beer.  Though I noticed that St. Somewhere just released a new beer, so I’m already missing Florida beer, and I haven’t even left yet…

Kegging, Interrupted

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The dubbel finally got done fermenting, after a good shake and another week in a warmer room.  So I headed down to my local homebrew shop, and picked up a used soda keg.  I was hoping to find a new one, because the price difference wasn’t that big and I’ve heard used soda kegs can have reliability problems.  But they haven’t been able to get any new ones in stock recently, and only had two used kegs left, so I picked the one that looked like it was in better condition.

Getting the beer in the keg was much easier than bottles.  It was easy to sterilize and siphon the beer into the keg.  But that’s where the smooth sailing stopped.  First, I found that I’d gotten ball-lock couplers and a pin-lock keg.  So back to the homebrew shop I went and picked up the right couplers.  Then I found that my store-bought 5/16″ gas line wouldn’t fit the 1/4″ pin-lock gas coupler.  I had never imagined that they might use different gas line sizes (I’ve been fiddling around with kegs and plumbing long enough to know better, but for some reason I still expect things to work out by default).  By the time I figured this out, the homebrew shop was closed and the Thanksgiving holiday was upon us, so the beer sat refrigerated but unpressurized over the long weekend.

Once back in town, the homebrew shop was still closed, but luckily my local hardware store helped me jury-rig an adapter.  So I hooked it all up and pressurized to my normal serving pressure (8-10 psi), but the keg was leaking CO2.  I tried reseating the lid and greasing the O-ring, with no success.  I’ve also read that increasing the pressure will help the seal (and speed up the carbonation process), so I cranked up the pressure to 25 psi.  As I increased the pressure, the sound of the CO2 leak changed in pitch, heading from a benign hiss to a worrying whine and then, just before making me truly worried, changed into a satisfying gurgle as the seal took hold and the keg started to pressurize properly.

It was then, crouched behind my kegerator, adjusting the pressure on the regular with a small screwdriver, feeling the frozen condensation on the gas line and regulator shaft, that it occurred to me that I should be worried about the whole Rube Goldberg contraption exploding.  Just in time to rock the 25 psi keg around to help the carbonation get going.  Standing on the other side of the kegerator made the CO2 canister less dangerous, so actually rocking a pressurized keg around on the floor didn’t seem so bad.  Now that’s done, and in theory we should have drinkable beer in a few hours.

Unstuck

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carboy next behind computerIt’s been a couple of weeks since we put the dubbel in second fermentation, so I checked the gravity yesterday expecting it to be about ready to keg.  Alas, the gravity was still way too high, only about halfway down to where the recipe calls for final gravity.  We hadn’t seen any bubbling at all recently, so I did some googling on stuck fermentation, and I think the problem is one I never expected in Florida: my beer got too cold!  We’ve had a few chilly nights recently, and it’s possible the beer got down to 60° or so, which can apparently make the yeast go dormant and settle.

So I moved it to the hottest part of the house — right behind my computer.  Our home office is reliably the hottest room of the house, several degrees warmer than other rooms, and we keep our aquarium in there for the same reason.  I gave the carboy a good swirl to stir up the yeast again (above and beyond the sloshing involved in getting it to the other end of the house).  24 hours later, it’s still bubbling every few seconds, but not going nuts like the initial multiplication stage of fermentation.  So I’m feeling good that the fermentation is back on track, and we’ll be able to keg it next weekend.

Mead in Bottles and Dubbel in the Carboy

Beer, Mead, , ,

We bottled our first batch of mead this weekend, after being in secondary fermentation for about 5 weeks.  The advice I found online about how long to leave it fermenting was all over the place, but mostly ranged up to 6 months to a year.  But we’re impatient and didn’t want to wait 6 months to see if it came out or not.

It was nicely clear, and apart from smelling strongly of yeast, was very nice.  The final gravity was down to 1.006, for a final ABV of 8%.  We used the same honey we brewed with for priming sugar (thanks again, Uncle John!).  We’ll let the bottles carbonate a couple weeks, and probably have the first bottle at Thanksgiving.

As long as we had the all the gear out and sterilized, we also pulled the Dubbel into the carboy for second fermentation.  It looked and smelled fantastic, so we’ve got high hopes.

First All-Grain Brew (Belgian Dubbel)

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We had one of the first cool days of Fall yesterday, cool enough to justify real shoes — with socks!  It probably won’t last, but we’ve been pining for cooler weather and the darker, heavier beers that go with them.  Beers that could plausibly go with shepherd’s pie.  So we took advantage of the nice weather and spent the whole day inside slaving over a hot stove, brewing a batch of abbey ale, using a recipe based on Westmalle Dubbel.

We had (almost) all of our equipment ready, and took the plunge and did our first all-grain batch.  This was also our first liquid yeast, and between those two things, it went about as well as could be expected:

  • Apparently, liquid yeast needs to come out of the fridge 3-6 hours before you can pitch it.  Luckily, I remembered to check just in time.
  • 5 gallons of sparge water took a long time to bring up to temp — roughly an hour.  And I thought I was being clever when I remembered to start heating it 20 minutes before the mash was supposed to be done…
  • It took roughly 8½ hours from starting to heat the water for the mash, to getting the fermenter tucked away in the pantry.  Mashing, collecting wort and the boil combined took 4½ hours, so the other 4 hours was spent waiting for water to heat up (or cool down), filtering wort into the fermenter, etc.
  • Our fancy new kitchen faucets don’t have a standard tap that the wort chiller can screw into.  So I ran a garden hose into the kitchen and hooked it up.  Of course, the hose had a leak and sprayed water everywhere.  Even with copious duct-taping, it still leaked a trickle.  Eventually, I had the hose angled down into a dish pan, collecting the runoff.  But that took a surprisingly long time to get right.

Unlike some previous batches, I actually remembered to take gravity readings at several points.  With the help of a handy little tool for temperature-correcting gravity readings, we got exactly the gravity called for in the recipe.  So we’ve got high hopes.