I don’t use a secondary very often as I tend to ferment in primary for at least two weeks then I cold crash and rack to a keg. Mainly I just like not taking the time to clean a secondary and then rack the beer. I prefer to just let it ferment out in primary and the next move is to the serving vessel. However, a secondary does have a practical applications occasionally, one being the addition of fruit.

AAAAAnd you won’t see that here. The few times I’ve done fruit beer in the past I have added fruit to secondary, then racked the beer on top of the fruit. This time I wanted to experiment with something different and keep with my simple one fermentor process I outlined above. In the case of my Cherry Wheat brew, I chose pureed cherry from a can. This cherry source is pasteurized at canning, so the fruit is ready to go. All I needed to do was sanitize the can, and pour it in the fermentor. Of course, I used a sanitized funnel to help get the red cherry goodness into the glass carboy I was using.

Going along with my easy as possible steps, I left a bucket of sanitizer next to the fermentor with my small funnel in it after the last brew session. All I did was to pull the airlock and bung out of the carboy, add the puree and replace the airlock.

No worries right?

Well, I did add the fruit 5 days into the ferment as I had planned. Thinking that the majority of fermentation should have been passed I hoped that by adding fruit to the primary would prevent a vicious blow-off. Well that part of the experiment was a failure. I ended up coming home the next day to an airlock dislodged from the carboy and it was full of fermentation goo. Not a problem though because I still had a bucket of sanitizer and an airlock already in there ready to go. The fermentation had already gone through its blow off phase apparently, because the fresh airlock hasn’t gotten gummed up yet.

I’ll have to edit this post with a link to tasting notes after the beer is done (in another week) to decide if the fruiting in the primary is as good as doing it in secondary.

BREW ON!

My brother “acquires” items from time to time.  I saw him yesterday and he gave me something he thought I could use.

A quarter keg:

I had some hesitations but took it anyway.  He said he was going to throw it out if I didn’t take it.  I just couldn’t see something like this go to waste.

My main hesitation in taking the keg was how to properly clean and sanitize this quarter keg for dispensing homebrew.   I have not done much investigation into it, outside of reading some posts that confirmed my fears that this thing is hard to clean and sanitize. 

What do you think?  Is there a way that I can use this for storing and serving homebrewed beer? 

Should I just open up the top and make it a secondary kettle?

What are the options?

Here is a curious thing.  I made a batch of Witte on Friday night.  It was sort of a last minute thing, so I didn’t make a starter the night before.  My plan was to make a starter while I was brewing the beer, let the starter go over night, then pitch the next day. Pitching late would also let me leave the wort I made in the fermentation fridge overnight to continue to chill down to pitching temps.  The ground water here is about 60F so it really takes some time to get an immersion chiller to carry the wort down to 65-68F, which is where I like to pitch.

As I was cleaning up at 1AM after the session, I realized I still hadn’t made a starter.  So I had to chose and stay up later and make a starter wort, or just pitch the yeast and hope for the best.  But as I was draining the kettle into my fermentor I realized I was going to have plenty of wort left over.  So I grabbed my sanitized starter flask and drew a liter of the wort into it.

Conventional starter wisdom advises against this.  First of all, most starter wisdom suggests your starter shouldn’t be above 1.040.  My wort was 1.053.  Second, your starters shouldn’t contain hops.  My wort had a 35IBU bitterness rating.  To top all that off the wort also had a couple ounces of orange peel and some coriander in it.  Definitely not things you typically seen added to starter wort.  Despite these “detriments” I broke from conventional wisdom and said SCREW IT.  I pitched my yeast into that 1L, put it on the stir plate and went to bed.  

The next morning the wort was creamier in color suggesting good yeast growth had happened.  There was even foam on top of the starter, which I never see with normal 1.040 wort on a stir plate… so clearly the yeast were chugging along.  I pitched the whole slurry into the awaiting beer around 11AM.  By 9PM, the beer was starting to chug along.I haven’t tasted the beer yet, but so far things are progressing along normally.

What have I learned here?  I am wondering if I shouldn’t just save my DME dollars and be doing this normally for most starters.  I wonder what the real harm is in using the same beer wort for my starter and pitching the next day. (Hold your concerns over the wort getting infected overnight for a different conversation.)   If the beer comes out great I’ll definitely make my starter this way again, to collect more data.  But it was very easy and cost effective.Only time will tell.

BREW ON!

I am planning on brewing up a handful of quasi-pale ales using only a single hop varietal per batch. The goal is to get a feel for the bittering, flavor ,and aroma of some varieties I want to understand better. I was thinking of a schedule like this:

60min -35 IBU
20min -15 IBU
5min -5 IBU
Dry Hop- (1oz)

I’ll figure the IBUs base upon the Alpha content of each variety I plan to use, which is why I didn’t list it in ounces. Except for the dry hop, which will really contirbute no IBUs and why the 5min is so low in IBUs.

I plan to shoot for a 1.048-1.052 OG beer brewed with 90% 2-row, 5% Crystal 60L, and 5% Victory malt. Of course, American ale yeast to keep it clean and simple.

Here are the questions:
Should I drop the 5 minute and just go with more dryhop?
And should I change the time on the flavor addition?

I was thinking of using these hops:

Nugget, Cascade, Columbus, Citra and Amarillo

As part of out time saving tips post, I mentioned that cold steeping grains may help shave a little time off the brew day.  This post will address how I view you can use cold steeping for saving a little time on brew day.  This post will also address what advantages and disadvantages cold steeping poses in the normal brew process regardless of time saving efforts.

The origin of the cold steep arises from the potential acrid astringency that heavily roasted black malts can bring to a recipe.  Malts such as black patent, carafa III, roasted barley and the like are all kilned at very high temperatures essentially burning the husk and putting a deep roast into the starches and sugars within the grain kernel.  This can lead to an ashy flavor whenever you add too much of these grains to a recipe.  In an effort to get a really dark beer, it is easy to over do it.

The results of a cold steep for dark roasted malts are best exemplified in the schwarzbier style.  Schwarzbier at its simplest is like a black (close to opaque) looking pilsner.  The greatest examples of schwarzbier have practically no roasted flavor.  The black malts lend only color to the beer.  How do you achieve this at home?  Well, cold steeping was one technique developed to get there.

Cold steeping dark roasted malt tends to extract only color and very little flavor from black malts.  The cold temp tends to not allow some of the ashy flavors to come out of the husk.  There are other techniques and ingredients available to help get color without flavor (carafa special and sinimar) but cold steeping is cheap and works with the ingredients you’d have on hand for the a recipe anyway.
[On a side note: employing the cold steep for infusing coffee beans or cocoa nibs into your wort is a great technique; but a subject for another post.]

The advantages to the cold steep is the extraction of color and some malt flavors without much introduction of astringent or harsh burnt husk flavors when using black malt.  A disadvantage of the cold steep process is that when you are not including these malts with other base malt at normal steeping temps you do tend to introduce a little unconverted starch into your brew.  In the case of black beers this might not be a big issue.  Secondly, if you are keeping the grains to less that 5-10% of the total grain bill that contribution is negligible.

How does this equate to saving time?  When I used to extract brew, I used to set up my boil kettle on the burner filled with water the night before.  The next day all I had to do was fire up the burner and get going.  I would heat the water to ~150-160F. Kill the heat and add my steeping grains.  After 30 minutes, I’d pull the grains out, refire the burner and start adding extract when I got to ~180F.  Using cold steeping practiced, you can put your grain bags of crystal and roasted malts into the water the night before also.  The next morning, pull out the bags and fire up the kettle.  When you get to ~180F start adding your extracts and proceed as normal.

Now, I know what you are thinking.  Why not just put the bags in at starting temp, then heat the water with them in there?  You can do that, but I found in the past that I get slightly better flavoring and color (in terms of intensity) when either the grains sat in the 150F water for 30 minutes or were steeped overnight.  I never really seemed to get full impact when I did the “ramping-to-temp” steep and heat process.  The steep and heat process was how I first started brewing.  After scortching the bag to the bottom of a heating kettle a couple times I went to the heat then steep practice and liked the flavor much better.

So you may not think of this as a big time savings, but when you combine this with other time savings steps that we have outlined, I think it all begins to add up.
Hopefully, this primer on cold steeping helps you out whether as another way to craft some dark beers without astringent flavors, or maybe it helps trim a few more minutes out of the brew session.  Either way, let us know what you think.

BREW ON!

This month’s Fermentation Friday is being hosted by NorthernTable.com.

The theme is as follows:

My topic is all about liquor….and how you use it in your brewing!

I think the best example of using liquor in homebrew is the Holiday Ale that Mike created. It may not be the season to be brewing holiday ales, but keep this one in mind for late summer.

Here is the recipe for Mike’s Holiday Ale with Bourbon!

If you have been following Brew-Dudes for the past few weeks, you know that as a part of the Brown Porter brew session, we threw in an experiment at bottling.  We had a bag of KreamyX and we wanted to see if it did what it said it would do: increase head formation and retention.

At bottling, we split the 5 gallon batch equally into two bottling buckets.  One had a priming solution made with corn sugar, the other was made with KreamyX.   We bottled as usual and we waited.   Both sets of bottles were placed in the same area for priming.  We tried our hardest to keep everything the same except for the priming solution.

Last night, two bottles were opened up and the contents were placed side by side:

Well, I don’t know what your take is from the photos above but it appears to me that KreamyX produced a fuller head that lasted longer.  The beer with the corn sugar as a priming solution had a nice head too, but the KreamyX outperformed it.