clayacrebrewing

[clayacrebrewing]

Bottle Day!

So I made it to bottle day! Man, three weeks is a long time and now I have to wait two more. At least I can’t do anything more to ruin anything. Not that anything is ruined, just overthinking things and made some decisions in the last two weeks that I probably won’t do again.

That’s me on the capper.

Let’s see if I can remember all the things that almost went wrong.

My original plan was for two weeks in primary fermentation and two weeks of bottle conditioning. That’s the schedule in the directions that came with the extract kit from Northern Brewer, all done, beer in the fridge in four weeks. HOWEVER, the label on the recipe kit box says six weeks. WTF? So there’s a second, five gallon carboy in the “Brewery in a Box” kit (also from Northern Brewer). So I start researching secondary bulk fermentation and I stumble across a wonderful website, howtobrew.com based on John Palmer’s book (that I’ve had on my list to buy for years). He has a good article about secondary fermentation that talked me into transferring to the second carboy. I see that secondary can really help with clarifying your beer. Less cloudy and less sediment sounds like a good thing to me. At that point, I decided I’d do one week in primary, one week in secondary, and two weeks bottle conditioning.

I transferred the wort to the smaller carboy, added the last of the dry hop additions, and put a clean airlock on. Then later in the week, I read more about secondary fermentation and found a couple writers, including John Palmer, who said that there’s really no point in doing secondary if you don’t do it for at least two weeks. So, I’m like, well crap. I just added another week until I can drink my beer. But I already noticed the fermenter starting to clear, whether that was going to happen anyway due to fermentation slowing down or if it was because of the transfer to secondary, I have no idea. I continued to watch the airlock bubble for a few minutes everyday and monitor the thermometer sticker on the side of the carboy. 

Temperature was the next thing to overthink. The sticker consistently read 64/66 there’s no 65 so 64 and 66 having color means 65, right? And 65 is the minimum temp allowed for good fermentation. Thermostat in the house is set at 68 at night and 69 during the day which is warmer than we usually have it because beer. I also have a cheap room thermometer sitting right by the fermenter that consistently read 20-22 C (why did I buy a thermometer that only reads in Celsius? Good question) which is between 68 and 71 F. Still good so I figured the sticker is slightly off. No big deal but I’m keeping an eye on it.

It’s finally almost two weeks in secondary so I start taking hydrometer readings because I saw on some brewing message board that daily hydrometer readings are the best way to tell when fermentation is done. I pull a sample. I kind of made a mess trying to figure out the best way to use the sample thief and get it in the test cylinder. Beer on the carpet (not the first time, obvs). I float the hydrometer... Is that 1.060? I can’t tell because the lines are too close together. I start sweating. 1.060 is a normal reading for the START of fermentation. What happened!?

I’m freaking. Was it too cold? The basement is really cold and the fermenter is on the floor of the ground floor. How much longer is fermentation going to take? Did I kill it with the transfer to secondary? I look up support at Northern Brewer and send a panicked email. Nate (guy at NB) says, “that’s really strange.” and asks, “are you sure you didn’t fuck this up somehow?” only much nicer. Anyway, I read the hydrometer wrong. I spent too much time trying to see through the bubbles in the test cylinder to see which line the level was at to notice that the BIG lines are the hundredths place and what I was actually looking at was a 1.006 gravity reading. Right where it’s supposed to be. Fuck me. LOL

Anyway, it stayed right at 1.006 for the next two days so I bottled today. I made a mess. Spilled beer and cleanser on the floor. Broke a bottle. Yelled at the cats to gerrouttahere! But at the end of a longer afternoon than I had planned, I have 44 12oz bottles of “Fresh Squished IPA” sitting in Troegs Brewing boxes right where my fermenter was. I could have probably got another 2ish bottles but my hand was cramping from holding the bottle filler wand and I was starting to see free hop leaves floating down the filler tube and I was just ready to be done.

Not sure how I feel about bottling. It’s a lot of work but a keg system isn’t in the covid financial plan right now. I have a few friends who report not great success bottling so we’ll see.

Two. More. Weeks.

[clayacrebrewing]

Coming Clean

I think I know a little about craft beer and brewing. Not a lot. I know when I really like a beer (usually an IPA or a stout) and when I don’t (usually a Belgian or something overly sweet). I know enough to know that I have A LOT to learn.

I did my first solo, 5 gallon batch two days ago. There’s a 6 gallon carboy, freshly purchased, sitting beside my desk with 5 gallons of wort on its way to becoming an IPA inside. It has a blow-off tube happily bubbling away in a bucket of cleanser (thanks for the tip, Logan) and my office smells vaguely of hops.

About two years ago, I brewed two one gallon batches of mead simultaneously. Actually, one dry mead and one kiwi berry melomel. A few years before that, I brewed a one gallon batch of an IPA using a kit I was given for my birthday that included an all grain recipe kit. Neither of those experiences were stellar. The meads just didn’t taste that great. I still don’t know exactly if the issue was an infection or maybe I just don’t like “real” mead as much as I like some of the meads and cysers and whatever that are sold in the beer stores. The one gallon IPA brew tasted ok but the carbonation was way off. It was super foamy when poured but it seemed flat when the head died down enough to drink it. Not a really satisfying experience either. I know now that the problem there had something to do with how I bottled it and the lack of priming sugar but I’m not sure exactly what happened. I chalked that one up to a total lack of knowledge on my part and incomplete directions in a cheap homebrew kit. 

Other than those two forays and a handful of times day drinking (I mean, helping buddies on their brew days), I’m totally green. So I spent a lot of money on some “real” homebrew equipment because this Covid-Christmas, my wonderful, supportive long-time girlfriend/partner (I’ll just call her my partner for the rest of this blog because girlfriend doesn’t begin to cover it since we’ve been together for almost seven years) and I magically have some spare money and that’s what I decided to spend my share on. My thinking is that spending money will help motivate me to do the research and have the perseverance to stick with it and get it right.  Kind of like buying a gym membership so I motivate to get some exercise and not waste the money.  Mid-life crisis spending? Possibly. I am looking down the barrel of 50 years in this world and I am already deep into other hobbies that, while not exclusive to middle-aged white guys, are definitely in the stereotypical wheelhouse of said middle-aged white guys. I’ll leave it to you to guess what those are.

During my brew day, I said, “Brewing is really just a lot of waiting. Waiting and cleaning.” I only used 1Step in my cleansing/sanitizing process because that’s what the instructions that came with the kit said to use. I wanted to do everything according to the directions that came with the kit because 1, I want to have a baseline for how much faith I can put in recipe kits and 2, I feel like I need to decide how much faith I can put in 1Step and see if I need to always use the Star-San I already bought. All that to say, I’m nervous about infection in this batch.

There. Intro post done. I know this will be one of the least read posts in this blog so I’m glad to have it out of the way.