Racking Clark's Manners

After 3.5 days of primary fermentation, Clark's manneres had slowed it's bubbling to 2-3 a minute and the Krausen was beginning to fall. It seemed prime time to rack it to secondary.

The transfer was easy, and the current gravity is 1.009, down from 1030 suggesting an ABV of 2.9. It's a very mild mild. It has some carmel notes, hints of chocolate, and a fair amount of fruity esters grapes, buttery diacetyl and some citrus notes. I may have fermented it too warm. It seems a bit more Belgian than brittish, but it's still intriguing.

Brewing low ABV variants of Belgian classics would be quite a challenge.

Yeast Washing

I came across this link while browsing BeerAdvocate at lunch. Wyeast's Yeast Washing Guide.  I'm getting ready to rack Clark's Manners to secondary, and my mind is already racing ahead to bottling.  I've always thought ill of the process of "priming" home brews with sugar to generate CO2 at bottling.  I'm no Bavarian purist, but that sugar charge seems like a cheap short cut.  I'd rather just spike the beer with co2 with a cold industrial injection.  Of course, I don't want to buy a C02 system right now, so that's out.  Kent's Manners and Kimble's Scottish ale will be sugar primed, but I will use an alternative means of carbonation.

The traditional procedure, called krausening, calls for an addition of freshly fermenting wort to provide carbonation. This step is easy in a brewery setting, but few home brewers crank out a batch of the same beer every month. However, through the wonders of refrigeration I can trick my brew into believing that it is popular, loved, and continually produced. The folks at the 7 bridges cooperative have done the math on injection of unfermented wort, or gyle.

The goal of this process is to introduce fermentable sugars into the beer, and allow them to ferment in a sealed environment.  Co2 is a key fermentation by-product.  During primary and secondary fermentation, so much C02 is produced that homebrewers must vent their fermenters, through air locks, or blow tubes, just to keep the carboys from exploding.  Bottles can explode too, so sugar additions must be controlled so that they provide enough pressure to yield fizzy beer, but not shards of glass.  The math is simple with corn sugar, as most of it is fermentable. 3/4 cup seems to be fairly standard.  It's safe and consistent, but isn't expected to produce fresh tasting beer.   There's a lot more guesswork when using wort as some sugars are fermentable, and other large molecules aren't.  Gravity readings lend some insight, and I'll use them conservatively.

I'll refrigerate my wort until the bottling day, and add some of the preserved yeast to start some freshly fermenting wort and a real krausening.  

Temperature Control Owns My Soul

One of the things that deterred me from starting brewing as soon as I received the kit was the lack of "adequate" temperature control. I can't exactly put Higgins in a box, and expect him to mind the fermentation while I'm gone.

I'm an engineer by training and character. As much as I appreciate the art of brewing, and hope to appreciate it more by participating, I am comforted by the science. There are knobs to turn, and variables to control that can influence product quality. Brewing isn't a hocus pocus black box, like vinting. Who cares about the slope of the hill where my ingredients grew? In fact, I’d wager that there wasn't a hill within 500 miles of where my grains grew. That's how little hill slope matters to brewing. Now I might care about whether my hops grew in Europe or in America... but that's mostly because American hops are on steroids. It's widely acknowledged, and can be traced to the concentration of certain acids. If I wanted to get industrial, I could control flavors by controlling the concentration of that acid in my brew. Of course, I'm just starting. That knob is out of my reach.

The only knob I can really get a handle on is fermentation temperature. Ale yeasts generally like fermenting somewhere between 60 and 70 degrees. Different strains have different comfort zones, but the ballpark is the same. If the temperature is too cold, the yeasts get lazy and don't do their job. If it gets too warm, they go crazy and start producing by-products like esters which aren't always well received by the beer drinker. Some times they're desirable, and can give a fruity taste. Sometimes they are just nasty.

Generally, I like yeast flavors and subtle esters in my beers. I'd like to ferment warmer temperatures (68-70) to ensure that I get some esterfication, but not too much. My fermentation closet (I live in an apartment) is about 65 degrees. It's ok, but not perfect. I want that temperature control.

My first solution was the purchase of a fermiwrap heater. It's a flexible piece of plastic with a lithographically applied coating, conveniently hooked up to an electrical plug. It's a good idea. The funny thing was that the fermiwrap was made in CA, but the heating element was manufactured by a company here in MA, Calorique. It must be a nice weekend job to take two commonly available parts, clip them together, bag, and distribute. Maybe I'll figure out a must have homebrewing gadget, and actually make money at the hobby.

Anyway, Kimble decided he didn't like the fermiwrap, and clawed four holes in it as I unrolled it for the first time. He didn't short anything, so I just covered the holes with electrical tape and plugged it in. The fermiwrap worked fine and warmed my brew up above 70 degrees. Unfortunately, the fermiwrap has no thermostat. So I had to plug and unplug it. I suppose I could have devised some goofy timer control. At this point, I am unwilling to drop $80-100 on a direct temperature controller to get the fermiwrap to behave.

My solution, which should have been my first idea anyway, was to go out and find the cheapest space heater with some sort of variable control. I found a ceramic one, with an oversized PC fan, and a dial that looks to offer more than 3 or 5 control set points. It works fine for heating, but doesn't seem ideal at dealing with cooling wart. The Fermiwrap had heated Clark's Kent’s Manners up to 74 degrees by the time I came back from the store. I swapped the space heatre in, and at its lowest sitting, the heater would activate before the wort had cooled.

I pulled the heater from the closet and let the wort drop below 70, now the heater is back and seems to be holding temps around 71. I don't know exactly because I'm using a Fermometer (a sticker that changes color along the scale and has 2 degree increments). It's not precise, but seems accurate and is incredibly cool. I've slapped them on all of my carboys, and put one in my beer fridge.

For a guy who's so anal about control, I seem to have a relaxed attitude about 1-2 degrees here or there. They call it a dead band in the world of process control. Instrumentation error, systems lags and the like add up to a nice window of "I can't tell the difference and I don't care".

Of course the upper end of this strain's recomended range is 72, but I doubt I'd be concerned if the limit was 70.

Clark Kent's Manners

English milds are a fascinating style of beer, and are somewhat difficult to find here in the states. Kate and I discovered them at NERAX in '04. The event spotlighted the style, and had casks imported from Britain as well as a few hauled in from local micro breweries. This traditional style predates the industrialization of brewing and packs a lot of flavor into a low alcohol beer. Colors range from brown to black. My personal preferences range to those with chocolate flavors. There can be incredible complexities in these subtle beers.

The general trend I've seen in American micro breweries is to generate complexity according to the Doc Oc philosophy of "More! More! More!". Whether its from stronger hops, more ingredients, more Belgian influence, or more alcohol, great complex American beers tend to be big beers. There's nothing wrong with big beers. I enjoy them. In fact my scotch ale may well turn out to be "big". The notion that brewers can get more complexity with less ingredients is simply fascinating.

I brewed this batch with a kit from Northern Brewer.

Here's the ingredients

Specialty Grains: 0.125 lbs. Simpson's Chocolate, 0.25 lbs. Crisp Amber Malt
0.25 lbs. Crisp Brown Malt. (I steeped these from the start of heating until 170 degrees - Northern brewer recommends a 15 minute max, but with my slow stove I needed 45 minutes to get 170 degrees. The grain needs to be about 150 before any interesting sugar conversions occur)
Liquid Extracts: 3.3 lbs. Amber Malt Syrup
Solid Extracts:1 lbs. Amber Dry Malt
Hops: 1 oz. Fuggle (60 min)
Yeast: 150 ml smack pack Wyeast #1275 Thames Valley Ale Yeast
Etc: 1 tsp Irish Moss (Not included, but I believe in clarification. I do not believe in filtration, despite the fact that it pays the bills)

Higgins started to take an interest in the brewery with this batch. He clawed holes in the grain and malt powder bags as soon as I brought the kit home. During my brewing he reopened the powder bag, and opened both bags of sanitizer that I stored in the box. Fortunately, I noticed most of this trouble before I lost much through the holes.

I would have been in trouble if he figured out how to open the syrup bottle.

I brewed this batch with a 2 gal. boil, instead of the recommended 1.5 gal. My pot is big enough, and greater volumes yield better flavor extraction. Maybe this would help my hopping problem. After the seemingly over sweet Scottish ale, I seriously considered keeping some of the hops for an aroma addition. That might not have been true to form, so I figured I would try to follow the kits directions (mostly). If it came out weird, I could fix it next time around. After all, the Higgins Heifer Brewery is in the business of brewing milds (among other things).

Racking Kimble

After five days in primary, the bubbling of Kimble's scotch ale had decreased to 1-2 per minute and the krausen had noticeably fallen. It was time to rack this boy to secondary, and free up the primary fermenter for my next (and intended first beer).

The racking went relatively smoothly, and the better bottles demonstrated the value of their design. I just sanitized some tubing, attached it to the valve. Sanitized the valve through the tubing (I don't have a lab squirt bottle yet). Rinsed everything, and placed the tube in a sanitized and rinsed 5 gal better bottle. I opened the valve, and watched it drain. It was almost too easy. I didn't have any valve clogs, and left all of the trub behind. I can probably improve beer yield with some additional finagling. It is just a solid-liquid separation.

The gravity of the brew was 1.018 suggesting 7.3% ABV. Kate and I drank the sample from our hydrometer tube. It was very sweet with a lot of caramel, and only vague hints of hop bitterness. I think that the hopping didn't scale well between the BOP recipe and my home brew set up. That or I screwed up. We'll see. Kate was surprised that the brew tasted so much like beer after less than a week. Maybe time will help resolve the sweetness issue. If not, Kimble's scotch ale will taste like something from the Dogfishhead brewery sans amarillo hops.

I did most of the fermentation at room temperature (65-68 degrees) and eventually hooked up a fermawrap for a day and a half at 70 +/- 2 degrees. Now it's at about 62 for a nice long secondary in my beer closet. We need to get access to our basement storage so I wig out a bit less about temperature.

Details of Kimble's Scotch Ale

This was my first brew. I'd gone a little crazy looking at all of the Christmas toys that I'd been allowing to collect dust. My ingredient kit was taking its sweet time to come in from Minnesota. I drove out to Woburn in search of inspiration from a homebrew shop there. It was a cold, heartless, warehouse filled with wine people. I don't get grapes.

I came back to town, picked Kate up at work, and headed out to Natick. We picked up this kit from Dan at Barleycorn's and headed home. I brewed late into the night. Our stove doesn't yield much heat, and I wanted to boil with at least 50% liquid volume. Our biggest pot wasn't big enough to hold 2.5 gallons, so I split it in two. Our 4 burner stove seems to have a fixed BTU output . It can all come through one burner, or be distributed across the four.

Any way the brew came out with a gravity of 1.072, which was a bit stronger than I expected although I had no basis for this expectation.

The ingredients included

Specialty Grains: 2oz Roasted Barley, 8 oz Caramel Malt (20 Lov.), 8 oz Caramel Malt (80 lov), 3 oz. Smoked Malt. (I steeped these for an hour between 150-160 C and kept them steeping as I ramped the temp up to 170)
Liquid Extracts: 3.0 Lbs Light, 4.0 lbs Amber, 0.5 lb Dark, and 0.5 lb Wheat
Hops: 1 oz, Goldings (60), 0.75 Fuggles (30)
Yeast: 1 pkt Safale S-04 (Whitbread)
Etc: 1 tsp Irish Moss

So It Begins...

Latin beats and waves of euphoria tickle my spine as I sit to type in time... keeping real, the enormous moment and a slice of lime. Type in time. It's free thought on the brewery exchange. Last weekend, I took the plunge and put some of my Christmas gifts to work brewing beer.

I figure that I'll document the madness here. Right now I have two batches in fermentation. Kimble's Scottish Ale is in secondary trying to mellow some of its insane sweetness. Clark Kent’s Manners (a Mild) has been in primary less than 24 hours, and is bubbling a few times a minute.

Coming this far has been an adventure, I'm sure the fun has only begun.


Music - Free Thought - 8 ft Flourescent Tubes (4/17/98)