Any beer and brewing blogging I’m doing has been moved to http://www.thebeerleague.com. It’s a site containing a multiple author blog about the Southern New England beer culture. Soon to have a Wiki chock full of random home brewing and general beer goodness. Come check it out!
Lots of fun stuff lately. The dunkelweizen w/ bock yeast came out very interesting. Nothing like I wanted but very drinkable. It almost reminds me of a nutty brown, but not english style.. just something weird. The maibock for zee’s party will be really good i think. I just started carbonating it last night. The Northern English brown did not come out so well. I’m going to carbonate and sit on it for another 2 weeks but it may not be party-worthy. Has some really bizarre flavors that are not awesome. When I tasted the unfermented wort all I could of was tea where you left the bag in for way too long and it got all tanniny. The flavor is definitely different now that its fermented but I do think I extracted too many tannins during the mash. I think with styles like that I may have to try some 5-star 5.2 product to adjust my mash pH and ensure I’m not extracting tannins.
And finally in other news, I submitted my Belgian Dark Strong ale to the Boston Homebrew Competition that was judged on 3/1. I got 3rd place in the Belgian Strong Ale category! I had no real thought that I might place I just really wanted the judges feedback. Still waiting on the score sheet. But that’s kinda cool. There were 11 other beers in that category. The Dark Strong was my 6th beer. I fermented it using recycled yeast from my previous Belgian Golden Strong. Both the Golden and Dark came out way too alcoholic so the Dark Strong has been sitting in a keg conditioning for 6 months, so that’s what the judges got. I’m going to be submitting it and my Golden Strong to the NHC (national homebrew competition) coming up shortly to get more feedback. The exciting thing about this beer is that it was a very flawed beer. I had a lot of things go wrong w/ my process while brewing and fermenting. So I can’t reproduce this beer to save my life. But it proves that age can make certain beers really shine and round out their flavors. And that’s what happened here. Now I’m dying to see if the judges detected any of the flaws that I originally had or if they have all been masked with time. Cool stuff, I’m excited! I honestly don’t see it as a real “win” because I can’t reproduce the beer. If I consistently made that same beer over and over and it was cleaning up in competitions then that’s something to really be proud of. But this is cool, it’s kinda like a pat on the back. Something to get excited about and be a little proud of. Yay!
Oh and another “minor” little piece of news (sarcasm) is that zee got his b3 1550 brewing sculpture. A sculpture is just an artsy fartsy word for a complete homebrewing system in one nice package… such as:
http://zeefreak.net/b3_1550/
Can’t wait to brew on it!
The holiday season pretty much took its toll and I haven’t posted anything, so here’s a catch up on the brewing scene.
The last post was about dunkelweizen and the belgian strongs. The belgians are coming along nicely. They still aren’t perfect but aging them is definitely working. The first dunkelweizen I did got tossed out. It was ass. I did another one and it came out better. In fact it’s on tap now and people seem to be enjoying it. It isn’t what I want though so I’m working on revising it.
After the second dunkelweizen I started a maibock. Maibocks are strong lagers usually released in the early spring. They take months to make so I got started nice and early. As of right now it has been fermenting for 4 weeks and it’s still not done. I did a gravity check and sampling this morning. It read 1.022 gravity which is too high to be completed. It tasted good, no off flavors, good smell, but it was way too sweet. But the yeast are still working so I’ll leave it for another week and try again. After it is done I need to transfer the maibock to a keg where it will cold condition and clear up. Then I’ll transfer it to another keg for serving. I probably won’t touch it until Alex’s St Patty’s day party in late March.
This Saturday I brewed the third version of the dunkelweizen. This one is the same as the second except I changed the yeast. Normally one would use a typical german hefeweizen yeast strain, but I wasn’t pleased with the flavors. My model is Erdinger dunkelweizen and it doesn’t taste anything like what I made. The grain and hops seemed fine, it was the yeast flavor. So Chris and I came up with the idea of using a German Bock lager yeast fermented warm at ale temperatures to get the right flavor profile. This will be an interesting experiment. To ensure the right ester flavor production from a normally clean lager yeast, I’m fermenting warm as I said, and I used not enough yeast. By underpitching the amount of yeast it triggers the yeast that are there to multiply quite a bit. And apparently kinky hot yeast sex makes for a lot of ester flavor. So we’ll see! This is a total experiment but made sense to Chris and I and I submitted the idea to Beer Advocate’s home brewing forum and at least one person had some positive feedback so what the hell. I hope it comes out because this beer is also going to Alex’s St. Patty Day party.
This weekend coming up I’m brewing a Northern English Brown, which is akin to Sam Smith’s Nut Brown or New Castle Brown. Again for St Patty.
Alex has been on a similar rampage for St. Patty’s day, brewing up an irish red / amber ale, a dry stout, an ESB, and possibly a hefeweizen, and english IPA.
And Chris has been brewing strong with the scotch ale scene lately.
Chris’s latest Scottish 80/- came out fantastic and for the first time is on tap in my kegerator. The poor guy will come to hate the day he started kegging. Now that it’s sitting in my basement ready to pour he may find his beer running out faster 
My kegerator is nearing completion. I have a 10 cuft chest freezer that I built a dolly for and made a 2×4 collar. The collar sits between the freezer and lid (which I removed and mounted to the collar). Drilled through the collar are 6 15/16″ holes for fitting shanks and faucets to pour beer from. I can fit 6 kegs in my freezer and pour from them at the same time when everything is ready. I have some of the parts I need coming in tomorrow and more parts will have to wait a little while due to cost. But at the moment I can pour 3 beers and did so for the Super Bowl last night (fuck the giants).
I haven’t written in a while so there’s some catching up to do.
The last post had to do with finishing fermenting the Belgian Golden Strong and reusing the yeast on a Belgian Dark Strong. That went over perfectly. I ended up just siphoning the Golden out of the fermenter so there was about 3/4 of a gallon of yeast/beer slurry at the bottom. Then I shook it around real good to mix it all.
I then brewed the belgian dark strong which I think went perfectly, though it’s hard to remember since it has been so long. When I was done brewing I poured a few cups of the yeast slurry from the previous batch right into my new beer. The fermentation took off within a few hours and finished beautifully. I fermented the belgian dark pretty cool, at 67 degrees or so. Belgian yeast can withstand much higher fermentation temperatures but I wanted this to be crisp and clean. Higher temps lead to an abundance of fruity characters in the beer.
2 weeks later I had a belgian dark strong. I was really looking forward to having it ready in time for Heather and Jon’s wedding. Well it was finished fermenting.. but not ready.
Both of my belgian strong ales have a problem. They seem to have a fantastic aroma and flavor, but there is a higher-alcohol bite that is WAY to strong. The golden I can understand because the recipe wasn’t exact and I went too heavy on the belgian candy sugar. The recipe for the dark was right on though. But I think I know why this happened and can easily adjust in the future. Here’s the deal.. it has to do with mash efficiency.
Mash Efficiency:
Beer is measured in points of gravity, or the amount of sugar suspended in a liquid. I don’t have my numbers in front of me but lets assume my belgian dark strong, before fermentation (ie. when I got done boiling) had a gravity of 1.080. Water is 1.000, so you can say this beer has 80 points of sugar more than water (which has none).
Now, where does this sugar come from? The grain mostly. Grain is loaded with starches. Luckily, grain also contains enzymes that, when brought to a specific temperature, begin to break big starches into smaller starches (sugars). Let’s say a particular type of grain has the potential to give X gravity points per pound. When I mash the grain (or apply hot water to it for an hour, mixing periodically) the enzymes should extract all that potential sugar into a nice sticky syrup that I use to make beer. The problem is, it never gets 100% of the sugar. What’s most common is you will get around 75% of the potential sugar out of the grain. That number, 75%, is your brewhouse efficiency and everyone’s is different. It depends on your brewing system, your procedure, the grain, how fine or course the grain is milled. I’m pretty sure on my system I can expect to get around 70% extraction rate.
Now here’s the problem. I have a recipe that relies on 95% of my sugar to come from grain, and 5% to come from actual sugar cubes. But that’s assuming I get 75% extraction from the grain. If I only get 70% extraction, I have less sugar from the grain than I thought. Now that may throw my percentages off and all of a sudden 90% of my sugar is from grain and 10% is from sugar cubes. The problem in that is sugar cubes are 100% fermentable, meaning yeast will completely consume that and shit it out as alcohol and CO2. Sugar from grain is not 100% fermentable. There are some sugars that are too large for yeast to eat, or they don’t like, and that leads to a residual sweetness in beer. It’s a sugar that you can taste, but yeast won’t eat into alcohol and CO2. So by having a low brewhouse efficiency, I’ve increased the percentage of sugar cubes, meaning I now have a beer that is just as alcoholic as it would be, but doesn’t have that sweet malty backbone to balance it out. It’s just overwhelmingly alcoholic. That’s my belgian golden and dark strong ales.
I can do two things now. I can let them age for a long time and hope over time things mellow out. Or I can brew a small amount of a sweeter beer and blend with these two. I’m opting for the former since I have some extra kegs. The dark and golden are sitting in a corner of my basement as we speak. They’re going to sit sealed up in kegs for at least 6 months before I try them again. Oh well…
Now the dunkelweizen… damn this brew pissed me off.
So I started off searching for recipes. It was very hard to find dunkelweizen recipes for some reason. Dunkelweizen’s are dark wheat beers. True you don’t see too many in the market but I’ve had a terrific one at a local german restaurant and really wanted to try my hand at it. So I eventually found on thebrewingnetwork.com’s forums a listener who posted his recipe for a dunkelroggenweizen, or a dark german rye and wheat beer. The recipe was very simple — some pilsner malt, wheat malt, a lil rye, and some dark grains for flavoring and color. I removed the rye from the recipe and replaced it with pilsner malt. Perfectly simple and understandable. Alex recently had great luck with a hefeweizen recipe that was very similar (minus the dark grains) so I was confident that the recipe was a good one.
So… I started by mashing the beer at 154 degrees for an hour and batch sparging and ended up with a brewhouse efficiency of like 34%. Yep that’s thirty four percent. Not 70% like I should have. So I basically extract only half the sugar I need from the grain. There are several things I could have done to resolve this. 1.) Bring the sugary water that I extracted up to about 160 degrees and pour it all back into my grain mash to try and extract more sugar. 2.) Do the same thing as 1, except take about 1/3 of the grain out and boil it first (called doing a decoction mash), then add it back in. This has the effect of warming up the grain, breaking some more starches down, and darkening the beer. Or 3.) Take what I have, 7 gallons of semi-sweet water and boil the living shit out of it until it’s a much more concentrated solution. I did 3 because I’m dumb and didn’t think of 1 and 2 at the time. In fact I had even planned on doing a decoction mash anyway and forgot.. grrrr. So I boiled my 7 gallons down to about 3.25 before it reached the proper sugar concentration (gravity points). This was a recipe for 5.5 gallons of beer, but I boiled off so much of the water I was at 3.25 instead.
The second problem was the yeast I bought. I picked up 2 vials of yeast for this batch. When I got home I realized they both expire in 11 days. Yeast has a 4 month shelf life and during that time their health drops out fast. 11 days before expiration leaves me with about 18% of the vial being actual healthy yeast. So I had 1/5 of the amount of yeast I actually needed. To compensate I had to make an entire gallon yeast starter (actually two half gallons, one vial of yeast into each).
So after the brew was done I now had 3.25 gallons of beer, and 1 gallon worth of yeast to dump into it. If I were smart, I would have said to myself “well shit, since I have only 3.25 gallons of beer, not 5.5, I should only put 1/2 of the yeast in there and save the other half gallon for something else.. like brew a second batch of this tomorrow to try and fix the mistakes”. But no, again I wasn’t thinking so I dumped the entire gallon of yeast in there. So now 1/4 of my beer is yeast. Needless to say the fermentation took off in like 3 hours. I woke up the next day to find the beer bubbling over the aluminum foil airlock I had made and onto the floor. This sucker is active! I plan on taking a test of it Saturday to see if it’s done. I can’t imagine it’s going to taste very good at all.
So to compensate for the shitty judgment on my part I set out, with inspiration from Alex who is doing the same, to come up with a brewing spreadsheet that will meet my needs. I want something that will help me formulate recipes, adjust them when I need to, help me determine my water amounts and temperatures, etc. And I’m almost there actually.. it’s coming along well though I’ve literally put like 24 hours into working on it. I’ve had to relearn algebra to do it which has been fun. With a little coaxing and sanity checking from Chris Clark, I/we were able to take this formula for determining how much boiling water you need to bring your grain from one temperature to another: Wa = (T2 - T1)(0.2Ga + Wm) / (Tw - T2), and convert it the opposite way to tell you if you had grain at one temp and added a certain amount of boiling water, how hot would it make your grain: T2 = (T1(.2Ga) + T1Wm + WaTw) / (.2Ga+Wm+Wa). I have to say, I never gave .2 shits about algebra in school and promptly forgot all the rules and I’m kicking myself now. I really really needed to convert that formula and it took a lot of research in wikipedia, purplemath.com (a good site for algebra tutorials), and some help from Chris for me to remember how to do it. Now I can do it in my sleep and already converted it again to Tw = ((T2 - T1)(0.2Ga + Wm) + WaT2) / Wa to tell me how hot to make my water if I want to add a certain amount to grain at one temperature to bring it to a higher very specific temperature. And it works perfectly! Yay.
OK enough for now, time for work…
So if I’m going to brew a Belgian Dark Strong Ale on Saturday I need to know if my Belgian Golden is done so I can reuse the yeast. Today’s the best day to place orders for brewing ingredients since my local store has late hours on Thursdays (convenient hmm?), so I had to check the Golden this morning to see if it was done.
Yep beer for breakfast.
So I had to get my beer thief ready and sanitized, pop open the fermenter and suck out enough beer to fill a hydrometer tube to get a reading. My 1.078 golden finished down to 1.008 giving it a 9.25% alcohol by volume! And it tasted that way. It had a lot of fruity esters from me fermenting too hot. The alcohol was pretty apparent. It was very dry due to the high alcohol meaning low sweetness. Overall, I wasn’t very impressed. BUT it is flat and I think it has to be carbonated to 3 or 3.5 volumes which is VERY carbonated. That will make a huge impact on the beer and it may turn out after all. I know my porter was pretty not good until it was carbonated.
So with that, I placed my order for the Belgian Dark Strong recipe. This will be a BEAST! It starts at 1.106 gravity which is pretty obscenely high and should ferment down to around 1.010 giving around 11% alcohol.
To reuse the yeast I was originally just going to siphon the golden out of the fermenter and dump the dark into the fermenter on top of all the residual yeast at the bottom. But I just listened to the latest Jamil show covering Saison beer where he stated that doing that with Belgians is a bad idea cuz you can actually have too much yeast! So I’m not positive how I’m going to pull this off. I think I may pour all the yeast into a sanitized half gallon growler or two, only filling 1/2 way. Then fill the remainder with boiled water (boiled to sanitize then cooled to room temp). Shake it up baby now (shake it up baby). Let the junk settle to the bottom and decant the yeast out into another sanitized container to try and get a solid gallon of yeast or so and use that. We’ll see. Repitching yeast like this is totally new to me. But it’s better than killing a gallon of perfectly good yeast and paying $10-15 to buy more from a store where they won’t be as healthy and ready to eat.
Wish me luck!
Haven’t updated in a while.
Last week I brewed a Belgian Golden Strong Ale. The recipe is from the masterful Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewery. He volunteered this recipe on a The Brewing Network Sunday Session episode as a clone of one of his famous brews. I was hoping to clone North Coast’s Pranqster but Vinnie’s was the best recipe I found for a Golden so that’s what I went with.
It’s finishing up fermenting right now, being a week later.
Next weekend I hope to brew again. I’m going to do a Belgian Dark Strong. The key here is one’s a Golden, and one’s a Dark. What I’m going to do is siphon the Golden out of the fermenter into a keg leaving the yeast behind, brew the Dark, and use the fermenter that the Golden was in for the Dark. This has a terrific effect on the beer. The yeast that I leave behind from the Golden will be healthy, active, and there’ll be a TON of it. The Dark ale should have a terrific fermentation as a result. Plus it saves me a good $10-15 on yeast.
Also last weekend Alex brewed a Bavarian Weizen (hefeweizen). This weekend I watched football as Alex brewed an Oktoberfest and Chris brewed a Scottish 60.
I’m pretty happy with these batches so far. I think both of Alex’s as well as Chris’s went without a hitch. The weizen and golden fermented hotter than I would have liked but we didn’t really have the resources ready to cool it to proper temp so we’ll see what effect it’ll have. It will likely make both of them fruitier tasting than normal which could be nice.
Google Map of PA Beer Trip
So for a little while now we’ve been planning a Victory brewery trip in Pennsylvania. There’s quite a few other great spots around there too though so I’m piecing together a Google map of other great beer places. Just a work in progress. No date set. I’m actually wondering how expensive it is to rent a largish vehicle for carting a buncha people down. Hell for that matter, how expensive is it for a driver? Should be interesting!
Well they’re carbonated and chilled and finally drinkable. The Wit is supposedly 5.15% alcohol by volume. If it is you really really cant tell. It’s very smooth and light tasting. More so than I thought it would be, which at first I thought was a problem. But now I think maybe I’m getting used to it. I also think the carbonation is a bit low so I cranked up the CO2 a little more… and noticed a small leak in one of my CO2 lines which sucks a lot. I think adding more CO2 will help give the beer a little more body and crispness to compliment the smooth sweetness that’s there. There’s also a strong orange character which is good, but again more so than I thought would be there. The CO2 may help with that too.
Alex’s beer is — wow how do I say this. It’ll blow you away. If you can drink pint after pint of this stuff you’ve earned your badge as an honorary hop-head. I sampled this right after 2 weeks of dry hopping so maybe I’m getting the most concentrated part of it but hooo-leeee-shit! That was one hoppy ass beer. Good! But damn hoppy (as its supposed to be).
Whew, it’s going to take me a bit to get my taste buds back to give it an honest review 
I’d consider it like eating a bunch of sweet green bell peppers then accidentally eating a habenero. That’s what it’s like going from his beer to mine. I can’t wait til he’s able to come over and try some.
Now for the next batch… what to do, what to do. I’m thinking an Octoberfest, but I wanted to do a Weizen Doppelbock. Now that Alex’s hefe is just about kicked I was thinking of trying my hand at one too. It’ll be a quick brew and quick ferment. It will be totally different from Alex’s. Different methods of brewing since I’ll try doing it all-grain this time and he did his when we were still doing extract. Plus they’ll be totally different recipes. So it’ll be interesting to see the diff.
Alex’s double IPA and my Belgian Wit both taste fantastic!
It’s been 10 days since we brewed. We had our beer in the chest freezer dialed into 68 degrees for 7 days. On Sunday after we got home from Rie’s, Sarah and I took both beers out of the chest freezer and put them onto the shelves in the cellar. I let them sit at cellar temp through Monday, which was about 70 degrees. The next day I hooked up a heating fermenter blanket thingie to both and temperature controlled them to 71 degrees. Wednesday I dialed them up to 72 degrees.
Today I pulled out the air lock on mine and stuck in a “beer thief” to take a sample. The thief looks like a long turkey baster except instead of a plunger thingie at the end it just ends in a small hole that you can put your thumb on. So I sanitized the tube, stuck it in the beer and put my thumb over the top to create a suction. Then pulled the tube filled with beer out and emptied it into a hydrometer tube. The hydrometer is a nifty gadget that looks like a thermometer. You plunk it into a tube filled with beer. The hydrometer will float inside the tube. Depending on how much sugar is in your beer it’ll float at different heights. This tells you how much sugar is left in the beer which can be a sign as to whether it’s done fermenting. I’m going to measure it again tomorrow. If it’s the same exact reading both days, that means the yeast isn’t doing anything anymore and the beer is done. If the reading is lower tomorrow, that means the yeast are still converting sugar into alcohol. I think it’ll be done though. The reading is 1.013 Final Gravity points and the ProMash software assumed it should be around 1.012. That’s close enough for government work.
About Gravity: Mine started 10 days ago at 1.056 which is a pretty normal gravity - this is the sugar content of the fresh unfermented beer. Alex’s was around 1.099 which is very high, what you’d consider a “big beer”. Gravity is a measurement of sugar and it sorta defines your beer. High gravity beers (1.066 and up) will either be very alcoholic if the yeast eat it all or very high in body or sweetness if there’s a lot of long-chain sugars that the yeast can’t eat.
Guinness would be high gravity (big body). Budweiser would be fairly low gravity (low body). It’s not necessarily related to color either, though that can tend to be the case. It all has to do with what the gravity was BEFORE the yeast went to work - basically how much sugar was available for them to convert into alcohol or leave behind as sweetness or body.
So now that I took my reading, I’m left with a tube filled with finished, but flat (no CO2) beer. No sense wasting it. In fact this was the moment I’ve been very very anxiously waiting for. So I took a sip. And Oh My God! Perfect. So far not a flaw that I can tell. It’s hard to judge a beer before it’s carbonated and chilled, but man I think this is spot on!
Later Alex came over and did the same exact thing with his double India pale ale. Wow!! This sucker is flavorful. I’ve never had a double IPA so fresh tasting in my entire life. The hops are jumping out of this sucker. They are so rich and tasty. And the taste and mouthfeel of the beer itself is phenomenal. I’m not a big fan of syrupy double IPAs and this is NOT one of them, the body is great! Also can’t wait til this one is carbonated.
So the plan now is to test again tomorrow. If both are still at the same gravity, then we will siphon the beer into kegs and put the kegs into the chest freezer. My beer will immediately get hooked up to CO2 to force carbonate. It’ll be done when we get back from Seattle. Alex’s keg will need to be dry hopped for 10 days. Basically he’ll take more hops pellets and/or flowers and put them into a nylon bag, and dip that bag into the keg like a cold tea steeping with hops! After 10 days he’ll take it out and put the gas on to carbonate the keg.
I’m so happy with our first all-grain brews. Both blew away my expectations so far. I’m hooked, never going back to extract!
So yesterday Alex and I brewed up our first all-grain batch of beer. No extract syrups or powders (unless specifically called for by the recipe). I’d say it took me about 6 hours total for my batch - that’s with setting up shop, brewing, and cleaning. And there’s still more cleaning to do but the brunt of it is done. I think Alex’s batch actually was 6 hours too. Mine was from 10-4 and his was from 4-10 basically.
My beer was a Belgian Wit (white) beer. The recipe was from Jamil’s Style Profile column in July’s edition of BYO magazine.
Recipe here
The mashing and sparging went perfectly! Those rubbermaid coolers with the stainless steel mesh hoses were great. I’m glad I bought an extra one because we used it for holding volumes of hot water for us while we did other things.
I basically started my mash at 11:13. So that means I had the cooler pre-heated with some hot water to make sure the walls weren’t cold, I had 2.5 gallons of water heated up to 134 degrees and I had all my grain weighed out and sitting in a big container ready to go. So at 11:13 I tossed the water into the mash tun (cooler) and poured the grain in while stirring. The grain brought the water temp down to 122 degrees just as ProMash said it would - and there it sat for 18 min. This part of the mash is called the protein rest. The purpose is to give the enzymes in the grain a chance to break down some of the larger proteins into smaller bits. The enzymes that do this work best at 122 degrees. It was supposed to be a 15 min protein rest but the next step took me a lil longer than I expected. While resting at 122 I needed to heat up 1.75 gallons of water to boiling so that I could add it to the mash tun for the next step. My timing was off though and it took a few min longer to get the water to boiling, but that’s OK I seriously doubt that 3 extra minutes at protein rest means anything.
So the next step is called the saccrification rest. This is the most important and longest part of the mash. At the sacc rest the grain/water needs to be heated to 154 degrees and stay there exactly at that temp for an hour. To do this I boiled up 1.75 gallons of water and added it to the mash (and warped the cooler’s plastic walls a little bit with the hot water). When I added the boiling water to the existing water it came to exactly 154 degrees so I let it sit for an hour, stirring a few times.
While that hour was going on, I heated up 4 gallons of water to 170 degrees and put it in the other cooler to sit for a bit. At this point the extra cooler is called a “hot liquor tank” for some reason - or HLT.
I ended up mashing for 80 min instead of 60. I had trouble getting my sparge water to 170 in time. When the water was hot enough I drained the water out of the mash tun directly into my boil kettle via a filtered valve at the bottom. When there was a few gallons in there I started the burner up under the kettle and continued to fill the kettle from the mash tun. When the mash tun was empty of water I took the 170 degree water from the HLT and poured it in the mash tun. This is called sparging and it rinses all the sugars off the grain. I stirred up the grain a bit and started draining that into the boil kettle as well. In the end I had 7 gallons in the kettle and it was at a nice boil in no time. My pre-boil gravity readings were spot on! So I did everything right! The boil 90 minutes long. At 30 minutes into it I added an ounce of hops to add some bitterness to balance the sweetness of the beer. At 85 minutes in I added 1.5 oz of freshly grated orange zest, .4 ounces of coriander seed (.1 oz of which was fresh picked from our garden), and the contents of 3 chamomile tea bags. It smelled fantastic!
OK after the boil was done I cooled the beer down as long as I could go - which was mid 70s. I siphoned into a 6 gallon glass carboy fermenter and brought it down stairs. Once I got down there I dumped my flask of yeast into the carboy, stopped up the top with an airlock, and ended up putting it in my chest freezer set to 68 degrees. There it’ll sit for 7 days at 68 degrees and then raise it slowly up to 72 over the course of 3 days. I finished this part around 4 pm.
This morning I came down stairs to find the yeast furiously bubbling away. So much so I actually replaced the small airlock with a large blow-off tube. One end of the tube is stuck tightly in the carboy’s mouth - the other end is in a nalgene full of sanitizer.
Now we’re in business! I hope this works out!
