And Another

Another

First pic's

Soda Anyone?

So after getting the beer into bottles and into the closet for a couple weeks, I decided to have a crack at making a Dr. Pepper type soda, as mentioned earlier, that I got from Hoptech.

The scent of the extract was like a mix between Dr. Pepper and cherry, which is probably why it was called Dr. Cherry. The recipe calls for 4lbs of sugar, about 15 grams of ale yeast, water and the 4 oz bottle of extract.

This would yeild 5 gallons (roughly 2 cases) but I only had one case of beer bottles. The thing to keep in mind here, is even if I have enough bottles, you can't just leave soda out. With such a rich supply of sugar, the yeast will continue to chow, making more C02 and the bottles will burst. So I need to make sure I have enough room in the fridge for 48 bottles of soda, as I also use my fridge for storing food. So I'm halving all the ingredients.

So I need the bottling bucket, spigot, tubing, thermometer, bottling wand; all sanitized. Then I get my pre-measured ingredients. I'll be making 2 1/2 gallons, and will need a cool-down, so I stashed a one gallon bottle of spring water in the freezer before sanitizing.

I got the kitchen facuet running nice and hot and then filled a gallon and a half of water in. I put in 4 cups of sugar (2lbs) and stirred. Then I stirred in the extract. Once everything was nicely mixed, I grabbed the bottle of water out of the freezer and dumped it into the bucket (for you literalists, I opened the bottle and poured the contents into the bucket). I also dropped the thermometer in the mix.

Once we were below 80 degrees, I added the yeast and mixed thoroughly.

I got the bottles together, connected the tubing and bottling wand to the spigot, cranked it up, and started filling.

This was 5 days ago, and I still do not have carbonated soda. So I have to work out what went wrong.

I was pretty good about sanitation, so I don't think that's it. I used ale yeast instead of champagne yeast, at the recommendation of Hoptech. At first I thought it just took longer to get going. I also thought it might be dead yeast, but I am getting a little bit of firmness on my plastic bottles, so they are going, but going slow.

Yeast also have a hard time breaking down table sugar. Perhaps I never got the sugar hot enough to break it down to a monosaccharide, therefore essentially teasing the yeast and getting them very angry.

Ale yeast are also more sensitive to cold. One benefit of using ale yeast over champagne is that when you put it in the fridge it goes inactive right away. In the interest of being able to make mortgage payments without eating dry cat food, we keep the house at a consistent 68 degrees. OK for beer, not so good for soda maybe.

The latter is my best guess, although the sugar could be another reason. I have a blanket on the soda now to see if that will warm the hearts of the little yeast, and wake them up again.

To test these suspicions and for due dilligence, I plan to brew the rest of the root beer with the ale yeast and make a batch of dr cherry with the champagne yeast. I will also try brewing in the dr cherry with ale yeast in the summer months.

Oh the joys of life.....

Bottled Up

Pictured at left: Beer, just before bottling, in blue sweatshirt, next to bucket.

Saturday was bottling day.

Ragtag collection of beer bottles was sanitized and dried. Tubes, caps, funnels, spigots, bottling wand, filter... all sanitized.

The first task was to get the beer out of the glass carboy, and into the bottling bucket. For this, I needed to cap the carboy with the racking (siphoning) tube and filter. I simply needed to start the siphon, simple except for the filter I was supposed to blow on to create pressure to get the beer up the racking tube, is not supposed to be soaked in water. I could not get air through the filter, and therefore I could not get pressure into the carboy. Beer no go.

I ended up having to blow directly into the hole for pressure, so again, I am concerned that the beer will be contaminated.

I was able to get the golden nectar into the bottling bucket (the one above in the white) and from there used a section of clear tubing to connect the spigot and the bottling wand, and brought out the bottles.

The bottling wand was kinda fun. It has a spring loaded stopper, and when pressed against the bottom of the bottle, allows liquid to flow freely. The liquid displacement is just enough to leave about an inch of headroom in the bottle when the wand bottle is filled to the top and then the wand pulled out.

I did this with the big bottles first, and then got about 21 12oz bottles filled. The smaller bottles were in a standard beer case with a divider, very handy for storage. But not so good for filling and capping. It was easy to let a few drips go over the side when filling, and when extracting the wand. Also, the bottles are difficult at best to cap when inside the box.

An upgrade for next time will be to place the bottles in a plastic storage container for bottling and then transfer to boxes after capping.

Two more weeks til testing time. Should be ready for the Superbowl!!

Beer Bottles

The carboy, which has been in the brew cellars of the Morrison Brewery (between Tickle Me Elmo and a humidifier) made it's trek to the kitchen a few moments ago, where it will spend it's last 18 hours before being drained of it's precious nectar.

Before it's journey started, my friend Frank returned from Mexico without warning, and a celebration ensued at my brother's house. Courtesy of that celebration, I had two cases of 12 oz beer bottles on hand. I decided to go hunting for larger containers, possibly with swing tops, to offload some of the bottling work. The show that initially planted the seed in my mind for trying my hand at home brewing was an episode of Good Eats called Amber Waves. Host Alton Brown's bottle of choice was a cobalt blue 22 oz. swing top bottle. The larger bottle size is a more appropriate beer size, and the swing tops were re-useable, minus the occasional rubber washer replacement.

More Beer was where the kit came from, so I figured I'd pick some up there. As it turns out, they had 24 oz long necks at a very reasonable price, but no swing tops. Hoptech had some collectibles out, but nothting for sale. Both purveyors echoed that they are getting too expensive to carry.

So I thought I'd give the old www a shot. I found many examples, most in the $40+/case range. The best deal I found was these http://www.home-brew.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=EMP3373&Product_Code=16ozbluflex12&Category_Code=BBTLS for $31.95 for a case of 12. 16oz bottles, cobalt blue. Craigs list wasn't much better.

The other challenge I had was paying for what others considered trash. You finish a beer, you roll down the window and chuck the bottle in the median as you drive by (just kidding folks). The thought of paying for that gave me a lot of trouble. Wouldn't it be better to just buy it filled with something, say, like beer, and drink that something, and then re-use the bottle?

The first obvious choice was Groelsch. BevMo had a 4-pack for $6.99 on their website. When I hit the store, I couldn't find it on the shelf. The guy at the counter saw it in inventory, but couldn't locate it either. Then the beer guru comes out and says that Groelsch was purchased by Miller a few months ago, and ever since, supplies have stopped. Supposedly they will work their way into Miller's distribution channels, but if swing tops are getting pricey everywhere else...

So I picked up 4 22 oz. Amber Ales with swing tops at $3.99 a pop (pun intended) and cut my losses there. It was Fisher, and for a French beer it was pretty good. The beer had a head that hung on to the inside of the glass as you drank it, similar to an English pub beer.

A co-worker keyed me on to these fancy sparkling lemondades. The bottles were 33.8 0z and clear, but had that swing top. I will have to store these in paper bags to shield them from the light. I only got two of those, as they were still $4 each.

Later, as I was addressing an urgent request from my 4-year old for some apple cider, I noticed the cap on the Martinelli's was a crown cap. The bottle was 25.4 oz, not too far from the ideal 22 oz. size, and with the label off, more or less looks like a wine bottle or fancy beer bottle. Costco had a 4-pack on sale for about $8, so I got a couple of those to add to my collection.

So at the moment, my rag-tag collection of odd beer bottles is soaking in a bleach solution, in preparation for their big moment tomorrow afternoon....

This one is well struck... it's got a chance....

First for the soda. The rootbeer project is complete. I tried it yesterday morning and it had a good amount of fizz. When you're staring at an 18, you know it could get better, but you could bust. No blackjack, but as I understand it, yeast carbonation yields less head than forced carbonation. There was only so much fizz I was going to get.

Next time I will let it ride a bit longer instead of the in-out, in-out of the fridge action. Probably shocked the yeast. I will trust the plastic bottles more next time since I know what to look for now.

On to the beer.

So I just took the specific gravity reading on the beer for the first time. We are sitting at 1.011, so it should be close to done. I will check it again on Saturday to see if it has changed. If not, then the beer is safe to condition and bottle.

Conditioning will be accomplished with a small package of corn sugar, a siphon and the bottling bucket. I mentioned earlier that I was having trouble with connecting the spigot to the bucket. I was feeling a bit discouraged that I was not clever enough to figure out why the hole and the end of the threads on the spigot were exactly flush, instead of stopping at the hole.

The folks at More Beer (www.morebeer.com) were quick to point out that they had mis-drilled holes in some of the buckets, and suddenly I was no longer stupid. They provided a corrected bucket, with apologies, and a new spigot, and I was on my way.

So if the reading on the hydrometer is still 1.011, then I will siphon the flat beer out of the glass carboy, and into the bottling bucket, leaving as much debris, or trub, at the bottom of the glass as I can. To augment my success here, and to minimize oxidization, I will transport the carboy to the counter where I will siphon it ahead of time. This way the trub has time to settle to the bottom.

Once transfered to the bottling bucket, I'll add the corn sugar and let it dissolve.

The yeast will eat the sugar and produce enough sugar to carbonate the beer, but not enough to create excessive pressure.

Now, after the measurement has been taken, I have this tall slender beaker of flat beer, and I'm thinking that I've been wondering if the beer made it through OK or was tainted by bacteria. So I look at the beaker. I give it a whiff. Smells OK. It's flat.... but it's still beer...

What the hell, I gave it a taste....

WOW! It wasn't my recipe, so I can only take credit for the execution (along with Frank) but damn that tastes pretty good.

It has more of a hoppy taste than malty, but I can taste the malt. The hoppyness was like an IPA, but there was a mellowness underneath it, remeniscent of Buffalo Bill's (http://www.buffalobillsbrewery.com/brewery.asp) Tasmanian Devil.

It will be interesting to see what it tastes like after 2 or 3 weeks in the bottle. I was careful to soak the tubing I used to extract the sample for the hydrometer in a bleach solution, and to cap the carboy again once it was done. Would hate to contaminate the beer now that I've come this far.

Tomorrow I will discuss the search for bottles....

Still A Bit Flat

This evening, we popped open another root beer. There was hiss as I peeled back the cap, there was the C02 emerging, there was even the sparkly acoustic accoutrement. A pour into the glass, a bit of fizz and then the head was gone.

So we will take the chance and let the bottles go overnight.

In the meantime, I made a field trip to another brew store during lunch today. It was a place called Hoptech, http://www.hoptech.com/cart/.

I was looking for swing top bottles and some more soda varieties. The bottles he had were only display, and we had some discussion about the cost of the swing tops getting too high, and so we shifted gears to the sodas.

I picked up a pre-packaged cola extract from Homebrew, but as it turns out, the Hoptech guy mixes up his own batches of extracts. He has 3 root beers, cream soda and a Dr Pepper type flavor he calls Dr Cherry (among others). The scent of the Dr. Cherry was amazing, and I like Dr. Pepper, so I went for it, along with the cola.

I will probably try the Dr Cherry first and go from there.

I think i will try to collect some 1 litre plastic bottles for further soda bottling.

Here's hoping for a silent night. Just in case, the root beer is boxed up.

*****

The ESB is at 39 seconds between gurgles. Did not get a chance to take a hydrometer reading. The guy at More Beer said with this particular brew I should expect to see a finishing gravity of 1.010 or so.

Brewer's log, star date 1-5-2009

We tried the rootbeer in the morning, and it was not quite ready. The taste was pretty good, but it finished a bit on the watery side. Next time, i will replace some of the sugar with honey and see what that does. I am also curious to see what agave syrup would do to the flavor.

We let it carbonate at room temp for the morning, but we were very concerned about the bottles breaking, so my wife put them in the fridge at 11 a.m. Yeast eat sugar and produce Co2 as a by-product. With a capped and sealed bottle, the Co2 has nowhere to go. The resulting pressure forces the gas into the root beer, and now you have carbonation. In beer, the yeast have just enough sugar to produce just enough Co2 to carbonate the beer. But root beer is heavy on the sugar. Left to it's own devices, the yeast would keep eating and making Co2, until the pressure was too great for the glass to hold. The glass would give way, in spectacular fashion, leaving my kitchen full of sharp and sticky shrapnel.

I had taken a few bottles to work for some alternate opinions, and as it turned out, it was still on the flat side. We made the best of it. I got some ice cream- a vanilla honey bee flavor- and made root beer floats; screw Monday....

My wife took the bottles back out at my request, and at 9pm they were a little better, but not quite done. I'm not going to leave them out over night (see above), but I think they will need a little more time on the counter during the day tomorrow to reach their peak.

*****

The beer is gurgling at 36 second intervals. i was expecting it to slow down more quickly than that. I will have to go into the beer shop again to ask about the spigot on the bottling bucket, so I'll ask if there are any leading indicators that the batch may be contaminated. I mean, it's at least theoretically possible to have a successful batch the first time out of the chute, right?

I have added two more bottles to the collection; these with the rubber sealed pop-tops. They came from some fancy French sparkling lemonade. They are 33 oz, so I don't want too many of them, but I do like the feel of pushing the little hinges with both thumbs, and hearing the loud pop and seeing the little cloud of gas rise from the mouth of the bottle. I don't know if I can wait 3-4 more weeks.

Quick update

Tried the root beer after the first 24 hours. There was a whisper but no hiss upon popping the cap, and just a hint of fizz. I will wait until tomorrow evening to try again. Once they are carbonated I will have to make some room in the fridge for the 24 bottles...

We're up to 35 seconds between gurgles on the ESB.

On the first day, there barely a few bubbles, by late morning of the second day there were lots of bubbles; the carboy looked like one giant bottle of beer with about 3/8" of head. Days 3-4 the brew was churning well and gurgling often. By day 5, the gurgling had slowed to about 25- 26 seconds, and the foam settled to a thin film, dotted with brown dead yeast.

At the moment, that is where we are. I plan to bottle on Saturday, although now that I know how to use the hydrometer, I may start taking readings.

First Brewed

So I thought I would ask Santa for a home brewing kit. So my wife, um, I mean Santa came through with a kit from a place called More Beer.

The kit included a glass fermenter and a plastic bottling bucket. My biggest complaint so far (other than the kit showing up under the tree sans glass fermenter, or carboy) was the lack of instructions on how things go together.

I headed down to the store on the day after Christmas to collect the carboy, and selected an ESB as my first attempt at brewing. I have been enjoying Fuller's ESB, and the yeast they carry comes from Fullers. At this point if it doesn't taste like urine, I'll be happy.

As chance would have it, my friend Frank was visiting from Mexico for the first time in a couple of years or so, and so he agreed to stop in and assist with the intitial boil. I enjoyed the aroma eminating from the malted barley as the color of the water changed to a light and then darker caramel. Then the hops. Strong, but floral.

Finally, we got the wort into the fermenter, cooled it down and added the yeasties to the mix. This is my third attempt. The first was a brew-in-bag, done with Frank, who is a chef. That was surprisingly good. The second attempt was with a mini brew kit, and the yeast did not show up for the party. For this attempt, I managed to destroy my wife's fancy thermometer during the boil, rendering it useless when trying to measure the temp of the cooled wort. So for the first day or so, I was in a panic, sure that I had killed the little workers.

But after a day, the top was bubbling and the brew was roiling. The party was on. Again, with the lack of instructions, I had the wrong top on the carboy. But a quick trip to the shop, for supplies for a root beer bottling practice run, yielded the correct stopper. The airlock was bubbling almost right away.

The main concern at this point was that we failed to put the lid on the kettle while the wort was cooling, which opens the door for airborne nasties to crash the party. I won't know for sure if we are OK until the beer is ready to taste.

I am a week into it, and have about a week to go before bottling. Two days ago I was 26 seconds between airlock gurgles, then 30 seconds, and 33 today. I also did not know how to use the gravity tester to get a starting gravity reading, as we were not bright enough to figure out how it works on brew day. I have it down now, so I will take a reading in a day or two when the length between gurgles slows down. Aiming to bottle next weekend.

In the meantime, I thought it might be fun to get the boys (6, 4) involved, so we all brewed a batch of root beer. I stuck with the recipe for a baseline, and will then experiment with different sugars (agave syrup, turbinado, evaporated cane juice).

I also got to practice washing bottles and learned the joy of siponing without the agony of gas.

So I have 26 bottles of root beer on the counter, waiting to test (or explode if I forget). I will check them tomorrow evening for carbonation, however they will probably not be ready until Monday. Rather than create labels that I will then have to soak and wash off later, I am just coding the bottle caps. So the first batch of rootbeer will be lableled with: "RB1". 2 1/2 gallons, with 5 cups sugar, 1 T vanilla extract, 2 oz root beer extract and 2.5 gallons of water. Used Champagne yeast at the recommendation of the More Beer guy.

I will post the results for the root beer as well as the status of the ESB as I go along...