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.