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indigi posted:Wit yeast has a really particular profile that I don't think would blend well with earthy or more floral types. This is just not true at all. What sort of hops do you think they use in Belgium?
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Jul 10, 2012 13:24
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global tetrahedron posted:As far as split additions of LME/DME go, I find that doing it kills my boil most of the time... a lot of the recipes and kits that call for a split addition say to add the remainder of the extract at 15 min. Heat up your LME in a pot of water (like fixing crystallized honey) before you add it to the boil. If you put some change or a couple forks in the water pot, or a chopstick through the handle to suspend it if the sides of the pot are high enough, then you won't need to worry about the jug burning to the bottom. When you add it to the boil, it won't be as big of a thermal drag and it'll pour a lot easier to boot.
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Jul 10, 2012 15:33
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To all the force carbers in this thread (myself included) one of the best tips my LHBS owner ever gave me, is that rather than hooking up the CO2 to the keg via the gas out and then tilting it on it's side or upside down and shaking - simply hook it up via a bev in disconnect, the dip tube goes all the way to the bottom that way you don't have to shake the keg on its side or upside down, you can just shake it right side up. Don't lower the CO2 pressure until AFTER you remove the bev disconnect otherwise beer will shoot up into your gas line.
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Jul 10, 2012 17:09
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I'm trying to create a recipe for a lemongrass-ginger wheat beer for August. Has anyone ever attempted this or something with one of those two ingredients? If so, when do you add them to your boil and how much do you add? I'll be doing an all-grain american wheat recipe as the base and then was guessing that I add them at 10 minutes at about 3 stalks of lemongrass and 2 oz. of ginger. Does this sound right?
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Jul 10, 2012 21:35
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Eco RI posted:I'm trying to create a recipe for a lemongrass-ginger wheat beer for August. Has anyone ever attempted this or something with one of those two ingredients? If so, when do you add them to your boil and how much do you add? I'll be doing an all-grain american wheat recipe as the base and then was guessing that I add them at 10 minutes at about 3 stalks of lemongrass and 2 oz. of ginger. Does this sound right? We just brewed a summery wheat with lemon peel and ginger, and on the advice of the dude at the homebrew store kept our flavoring add-ins pretty low, at about 1/2 oz each (pre-dried stuff we bought at the homebrew shop). We added them at about 15 minutes left in the boil. The result in a 5-gallon batch is that the spices are there kind of in the background, but you don't necessarily think "this is a ginger-lemon beer" when you take a sip. (Also it didn't really carbonate properly so while the flavor is good it's not quite what we wanted. Bottling  )
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Jul 10, 2012 21:43
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Eco RI posted:I'm trying to create a recipe for a lemongrass-ginger wheat beer for August. Has anyone ever attempted this or something with one of those two ingredients? If so, when do you add them to your boil and how much do you add? I'll be doing an all-grain american wheat recipe as the base and then was guessing that I add them at 10 minutes at about 3 stalks of lemongrass and 2 oz. of ginger. Does this sound right? Consider a small amount of Sorachi Ace (maybe .5 oz) with about 10 minutes left if you want a lemony flavor that won't get drowned out by the ginger.
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Jul 10, 2012 22:30
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Bah. My dad just called to say he hasn't seen any activity in the airlock for the saison we brewed on the 4th. I told him to crack it and look for foam/crust/anything and he says it looks clean and exactly like it did after we brewed. Sigh, first time a yeast has failed me.
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Jul 10, 2012 22:55
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Jacobey000 posted:This is just not true at all. What sort of hops do you think they use in Belgium? They don't shoot for IPA levels of flavor and aroma in wits, the hops are hardly noticeable. I can't imagine bombing it with Saaz or Spalt because the spiciness would clash. wafflesnsegways posted:I thought you don't get a hot break at all with extract. (Or maybe just not much of a hot break?)
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Jul 10, 2012 23:53
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I know this is probably one of those newbie freakouts, but should I be concerned/care/be happy about krausen dropping on day 3 of my ferment? I'm making an English porter with US-04 yeast and the thing was going pretty vigorously within hours of pitching. I had to submerge the fermenter bucket in my bathtub as the room was at 20 degrees C and I wanted a cooler ferment than that. Still, it probably didn't sit at the ideal 16-17C and may have gone through stuff quicker. I'll definitely leave it for a number of days yet before sampling gravity, but was just impressed/concerned about the blitzing it seems to have gone through.
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Jul 11, 2012 13:22
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It's fine.
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Jul 11, 2012 15:09
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withak posted:It's fine. Truth. Most good active ferments really do the bulk of their work within about three days. In particular, I have found S-04 to be kind of a beast for working through the sugars, so I am not surprised to hear that it is slowing down already. It's very likely still doing some minor fermenting and cleaning up of diacetyl and so forth, so yes, leave it alone for another week or so at minimum before packaging.
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Jul 11, 2012 15:38
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Jo3sh posted:It's very likely still doing some minor fermenting and cleaning up of diacetyl and so forth, so yes, leave it alone for another week or so at minimum before packaging. How do you decide this is done? Is it enough to change the gravity readings? If not, why not bottle now and let it finish in the bottle? e: I'm asking because I'm in a similar position, my buckets are a week old today and looking done at 1.01 according to yesterday and today's hydrometer readings. Splizwarf fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Jul 11, 2012 |
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Jul 11, 2012 15:47
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Splizwarf posted:How do you decide this is done? Is it enough to change the gravity readings? If not, why not bottle now and let it finish in the bottle? Best way to decide whether the ferment and cleanup are done is by taking careful gravity readings and then tasting the samples for "green" or "young" flavors. A gravity that has stopped changing and is near where you anticipated it to be is a very good sign, and the beer might very well be in range within three days given an aggressive ferment, but the beer is probably still settling and being cleaned up at that early date. After a week, it's possible that all the cleanup is done, and I agree it's very tempting to package the beer then. However, another week on the yeast cake is only going to help with any remaining cleanup, and the time will allow more solids to fall out of suspension. Aging in bottles might work, but the mass of yeast in the fermenter will only speed up any cleanup, and anything you can sediment in the fermenters won't sediment in the bottles.
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Jul 11, 2012 16:06
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I think that's more of an experience call. As you work with a yeast you kinda figure out how long it needs after fermentation.
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Jul 11, 2012 16:07
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Speaking of beers sitting for a while on the cake, I had a stout sit for about 2 months after fermentation probably finished. This summer has been hell of busy and we never had the time to deal with bottling it, so I just kept it at the right temp and waited for the right day to arrive. Finally got it primed and bottled last Wednesday and cracked one last night to see how it turned out, only to find it hadn't carbonated at all, not even a little. I expected it to be a little weak on bubbles since I was a day short of the full week, but not dead flat! Did my yeast die off entirely? What should I do now? I have about 2 cases of this.
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Jul 11, 2012 16:20
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Did you forget the sugar when you primed?
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Jul 11, 2012 16:26
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Nah, I'm sure we sugared it because it was a bitch compared to corn sugar: the recipe called for DME as the priming sugar and I had to use a sterilized immersion blender to deal with all the lumps before adding it to the bottling bucket.
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Jul 11, 2012 16:35
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Did you actually boil the DME in some water? If not that could be your problem, that it didn't get dissolved enough. If you didn't boil it there's almost no chance it got distributed evenly through the beer so you'll likely have some bottles overcarbed and some bottles undercarbed. You can try to flip your cases upside down rotating them once a week for a month, this helps to ensure everything gets stirred up a little bit and mixed in a little better. Try a bottle once a week and if you don't have any carbonation after a month then you can move on to more drastic measures.
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Jul 11, 2012 18:03
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I always use a table sugar/water solution to prime because the flavour contribution from the priming agent is generally so miniscule I don't factor it into the beer, no matter what the recipe calls for.
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Jul 11, 2012 20:16
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crazyfish posted:I always use a table sugar/water solution to prime because the flavour contribution from the priming agent is generally so miniscule I don't factor it into the beer, no matter what the recipe calls for. Yeah, but it's not in line with the German Purity Law 
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Jul 11, 2012 20:34
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Angry Grimace posted:Yeah, but it's not in line with the German Purity Law The last time Germans started worrying about purity bad things happened, you'd think we'd have learned by now. Yeah, I just Godwined the beer thread. Totally worth it for adjuncts.
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Jul 11, 2012 20:39
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zedprime posted:The last time Germans started worrying about purity bad things happened, you'd think we'd have learned by now. 
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Jul 11, 2012 20:41
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Man, WLP090 San Diego Super Yeast is no joke. I brewed a double IPA on Saturday and pitched the yeast at around 4pm. Cleaned up and went out to dinner, when I came home around 9 it was already pushing krausen through the blowoff tube. I took a gravity reading today, 4 days later, and it is already down to 1.013 from 1.080.
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Jul 11, 2012 22:36
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internet celebrity posted:Man, WLP090 San Diego Super Yeast is no joke. I brewed a double IPA on Saturday and pitched the yeast at around 4pm. Cleaned up and went out to dinner, when I came home around 9 it was already pushing krausen through the blowoff tube. I took a gravity reading today, 4 days later, and it is already down to 1.013 from 1.080. It's pretty crazy, I had a similar experience - pitched at 10pm, krausen up to the tube at 8 am.
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Jul 11, 2012 22:39
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I once had that happen with a kit beet and US-05 with 20% headspace. sort of caught me off gaurd. It's a good thing I brew on weekends and stay up late. It was super active for a good 3-4 days. It wasn't even a high gravity (1.036) to (1.008). I came home from the bar and had to stumble about with the airlock and tube. Caught me quite off gaurd.
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Jul 11, 2012 22:50
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No_talent posted:I once had that happen with a kit beet and US-05 with 20% headspace. sort of caught me off gaurd. It's a good thing I brew on weekends and stay up late. It was super active for a good 3-4 days. It wasn't even a high gravity (1.036) to (1.008). I came home from the bar and had to stumble about with the airlock and tube. Caught me quite off gaurd.
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Jul 11, 2012 22:53
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I got bored last night and decided to brew a kit I had been ignoring for a few weeks. It's an all-grain sweet milk stout. I've done one oatmeal stout before from extract, but this is my darkest all-grain yet. I don't know exactly what it'll taste like, but I mixed some excess wort with vodka and had an excellent drink while waiting on the boil. The grain bill is listed in the first picture's caption, the hops and lactose are listed further down. http://imgur.com/a/pdxkB
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Jul 12, 2012 00:36
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I've been assembling my nitro setup and adding more regular faucets and kegs. In the process of buying shitloads of Tygon tubing, I wanted a new kind of clamp. worm drive hoseclamps are poo poo and leave a flatspot and can leak, Oetikers are great but leak and not reusable. T-clamps don't exist that small, etc. I found my holy grail. It's not for everyone, but I'm in love.  It's a clamptite tool. You use stainless wire (or whatever you want) to build a one time use clamp. Doesn't pinch or flatspot, it's easy to remove and you can use as much or as little pressure as you want. It's a little finicky to do at first (and it's undoubtedly slower than pretty much any other clamp type), but stainless wire is cheap as poo poo, and it's a useful tool for lots of other stuff. I clamped all my keg fittings with it, as well as the silicone hose for my brewstand QD's and chiller fittings. http://www.clamptitetools.com/ I bought the cheapest one, and shipping was like 7 bucks. I already had the wire (the wire on the clamptite website is horrifyingly overpriced).
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Jul 12, 2012 01:07
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I've been happy with the Oetiker clamps I recently installed on my rig (the "stepless" variety), but just out of curiosity, what diameter of wire are you using? Would aircraft safety wire work?
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Jul 12, 2012 01:25
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I'm using .032 soft stainless in that picture. I've got some .024 stainless I'm going to give a try next. The .032 is just about perfect as far as I'm concerned though. I've got a lot of oetiker clamps already on my keg fittings, but I switched to tygon tubing and it's going to take a little bit of experimenting to get the pour right. I hate to destroy 3-4 nice clamps taking off a foot at a time. The clamptite thing isn't right for everyone, but I'm in love.
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Jul 12, 2012 01:33
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Hell of useful for cars, too.
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Jul 12, 2012 03:30
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What is tygon tubing? I am googling around a bit, but I can't find anything extolling it's virtues other than the branding website. Also, where are you getting your nitro? Imasalmon fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jul 12, 2012 |
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Jul 12, 2012 04:36
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Imasalmon posted:What is tygon tubing? I am googling around a bit, but I can't find anything extolling it's virtues other than the branding website. Tygon is just a tubing company, but the popular tubing is a food and dairy spec called B-44-4X, and it works quite well for kegging. Stays flexible, not terribly overpriced, no plastic shower curtain taste or anything, etc. http://www.mcmaster.com/#5553K12 3/16 ID, 5/16 OD, 1/16 Wall, 40 PSI It's $1.06 per foot if you order 50ft, which is a kickass deal compared with what you find at a homebrew shop when you consider how nice the tubing is. US Plastic also has it for a bit less. I went with mcmaster because the difference was $3 and mcmaster is very very close to my house. Both are in Ohio http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=32951&catid=864 Nitro is coming from my welding gas store. Most places keep 1-2 nitro bottles in stock ready to go. Hypnolobster fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Jul 12, 2012 |
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Jul 12, 2012 11:03
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This is the Saison I brewed last thursday.  I was away for a couple days right after I made it so I didn't actually observe active fermentation but it seemed to stop bubbling around last sunday. Its cloudy as hell and looks like orange juice. Should I attempt to transfer it to a secondary to clear it up more or just go with the flow? The OG on this was 1.041 and it should be ready to bottle in 2 weeks
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Jul 12, 2012 13:21
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I have a biere de garde that has fermented for two weeks and will now sit at 32 degrees for about a month. Is this long enough that it'd be worth racking to secondary? Does the cold temperature of have any influence on whether or not it'd be worth it?
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Jul 12, 2012 13:22
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lazerwolf posted:Should I attempt to transfer it to a secondary to clear it up more or just go with the flow? There's nothing wrong with a cloudy saison, but if you did want to clear it up I'd let it sit in the primary for 10 days before transferring it to a secondary. That will give the yeast enough time to clean up any off flavors that may have been produced during the fermentation. nominal posted:I have a biere de garde that has fermented for two weeks and will now sit at 32 degrees for about a month. Is this long enough that it'd be worth racking to secondary? Does the cold temperature of have any influence on whether or not it'd be worth it? The temperature doesn't really matter as far as racking to secondary. The only real issue is oxygen ingress, buckets let in a decent amount more oxygen than carboys do. Generally if I'm going to lager something I'll transfer it to a carboy, I try not to let my beer sit in buckets for more than 3-4 weeks total. The only other thing to consider is that if you transfer to a secondary you'll probably end up with a clearer beer. When I do a beer I'm going to lager I'll crash cool it at 34* for 2-3 days, then rack it to a secondary (carboy) to do my lagering. This usually results in pretty good clarity.
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Jul 12, 2012 14:34
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Josh Wow posted:Did you actually boil the DME in some water? If not that could be your problem, that it didn't get dissolved enough. If you didn't boil it there's almost no chance it got distributed evenly through the beer so you'll likely have some bottles overcarbed and some bottles undercarbed. This is probably my problem. At the time I mistakenly decided that the boil was clearly for sterilization, and the fact that an immersion blender wouldn't be enough to get it into a complete solution (while it does do a great job) didn't occur to me. I sanitized my tools, dipped 4 cups out of the bucket, blendered the DME in that, then poured the mixture into the bottling bucket and siphoned the fermentation bucket in on top. I think the disconnect happened because DME is so damned lumpy when it hits water (even when boiling it) and I was fixated on how to deal with that. It's probably a good assumption that it's going to be uneven carbonation, then. What's the best solution? Some might be good but I'm not happy about the idea of finding out by trial and error when it's time to have a beer (or worse, time to share with friends). What about pouring them all back warm into a bottling bucket and rebottling using priming drops? I think the best option would probably be to just keg it all, wait a couple weeks, and then keep it on tap instead of rebottling, but I don't have any parts of that setup yet; I'd intended to save for a couple more months before stepping off the deep end. 
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Jul 12, 2012 16:36
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My citra/amarillo/cascade IPA is loving delicious. I'm so happy 
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Jul 12, 2012 16:53
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Mr. Glass posted:My citra/amarillo/cascade IPA is loving delicious. I'm so happy   Hoorah for hops! My Amarillo/Falconers Flight/Simcoe copper is also unbelievably tasty, still has a bit of green-ness to it and has some clearing up to do, can't wait for this one to develop over the next week or so.
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Jul 12, 2012 17:16
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Hypnolobster posted:I've been assembling my nitro setup and adding more regular faucets and kegs. Welp, that looks awesome. I just bought one as I have some brewing-related clamping projects to do.
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Jul 12, 2012 18:11
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