Well, Mike and I bottled up half of the honey wheat ale last night and racked the other half onto a gallon of honey water goodness (1.5 pounds of honey in one gallon of water heated at 170F for 30 minutes -cooled to fermentation temperatures).

These photos will tell a better story:

Bottles and siphon ready to go

Opening up the fermentation bucket

Racking to the bottling bucket 

Sanitized carboy ready for the second half

Finished bottles.

Reward!

Krausen in the carboy (24 hours later)

In two weeks, we’ll know how the original beer came out.  In 4 weeks (and many weeks after that) we’ll see how the experiment came out.

If you would like to follow along with this brew session, check out these links:

Honey Wheat Ale Recipe

Honey Wheat Ale Ingredients

Honey Wheat Ale Update

Honey Wheat Ale Plans

Honey Water Solution

I wanted to figure out what kind of honey/water solution I could make for this honey wheat ale experiment.  Through an email conversation, Mike gave me information on how to determine the specific gravity of a honey/water solution.

Seeing how the gravity of honey is going to vary a bit from season to season/batch to batch, I tried to figure out the best way to get to the SG value.  Here is what I figured out:

Best thing is you can apply this method to any new sugar or sugar solution you may want to determine the SG and PPG for (agave nectare, fruit extracts, maple syrups, etc…)
Specific gravity is a measure of points per pound per gallon.  Therefore, let’s put a pound of honey in one gallon and see what the hydrometer says….but that would be a waste of honey.

So we’ll  calculate it down to a reasonable level.

I’ll assume that you need two cups of volume to get adequately fill a hydrometer tube.

One gallon is 16 cups.

So two cups is 1/8th of a gallon.

Conveniently enough, one pound is equal to 16 ounces by weight.

1/8 of 16oz is 2oz.
So if you put 2oz of honey into a total FINAL volume of 2 cups, you can read that with the hydrometer and get an SG and figure out the PPG as well [PPG=(SG-1)*1000].  Reason being, is that 2oz of honey in 2 cups of water would be the same thing as 16oz (1pound) in 16 cups (1 gallon).

The way to do this is to put a measuring cup on your scale, tare it to zero, then squeeze in 2oz (BY WEIGHT) of honey.  Then add some tap water until you hit the 2 cup mark.  You can’t add two cups of water to the honey, because the honey has volume too and some water in it (albeit very little H2O).  Stir well until you think all the honey is dissolved. Then transfer to the hydro tube and read it.

Now the only thing left to do is figure out how many of points of honey you want to add and decide if that is a reasonable number of pounds or ounces of honey to achieve a desired effect in the final product from a flavor perspective.

Advanced Lesson:  If you are really clever, you could even use one ounce of honey in a final volume of two cups, then multiply the resultant PPG times 2 to account for the extra dilution.  Why would you do this?  Save on honey.  You can dilute it even more, but keep in mind that you may slip below the accuracy of the hydrometer at too low a gravity (reading 1.004 probably isn’t very accurate).  I would only dilute it once anyway because I think the gravity of 2oz in 2 cups is going to come it around 1.045-1.035.

I think I would like to shoot for a SG of 1.060 for the honey solution.  After we run this little experiment, we’ll know how much honey to add or subtract from a gallon of water.

Update: I just ran this experiment (mixing 2 cups of water with 2 oz by weight of honey) and got a hydrometer reading of 1.040!  Using Mike’s post (see below), I will need 1.5 lbs of honey to dissolve into 1 gallon of water to get a 1.060 SG.

If you would like to know more about this subject, read this post about working with Points Per Pound Per Gallon and Specific Gravity.

More Honey Wheat Ale Brew Log posts:

Honey Wheat Ale Recipe

Honey Wheat Ale Ingredients

Honey Wheat Ale Update

Honey Wheat Ale Plans

Honey Wheat Ale Bottling Day

Mike and I were talking this weekend about the honey wheat ale I have in the fermenter right now.

Our conversation was a continuation of thoughts I had about this brew.

I want to split this brew in half.  One half I am going to prime and bottle as usual.

The other half I want to rack to a glass fermenter on top of some kind of honey/water mixture.

What we need to work out is what the honey/water ratio is going to be.

The second half batch is an experiment in infusing honey flavor into a beer.

Once it’s racked, I will let it ferment/condition for another 2 weeks and bottle again.

It will interesting to compare the two halves once they are ready to drink.

We’ll let you know what the ration we come up with will be.

If you would like to follow along with this brew session, check out these links:

Honey Wheat Ale Recipe

Honey Wheat Ale Ingredients

Honey Wheat Ale Update

Honey Water Solution

Honey Wheat Ale Bottling Day

I set up a Google alert a while back to send me links to web pages that are related to homebrewing. There was one link that had a subject of reusing hops. Here’s the link:
http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/1898207

In this post, the author details how he reused hops to bitter a beer that were used to dry hop a previous beer. The facinating aspect of his experiment was that he used pellet hops.

Has anyone else tried this? If you have a BA login, you can read more.

From several posts ago I whipped up an American Brown Ale in which I chose to blend to strains of dried yeast.  I spoke about the purposes of trying the blend in Yeast Blending post.

Now more than a month later I am prepared to share some results!

My primary goal with blending US-05 with S-04 was to see if the super flocculating S-04 would help to pull out the low flocculating US-05.  US-05 always seems to take more time to clear out, flocculation starting somewhere after day 10 in primary.  S-04 on the other hand tends to finish up and start flocculating within 3-5 days.

In this first pass experiment, I was pleased to witness that the total yeast suspension was falling out of solution very rapidly within 5 days.  By 14 days my final gravity (1.012) was achieved and the beer was basically clear.  I used a glass carboy just for the purpose of monitoring the yeast activity.  The yeast cake was very tight (as you see with S-04), but not as firm as you normally see with S-04 alone.  Perhaps this is a result of the combination with the lower flocculator US-05.

The secondary result is the taste.  I would say that the flavor is stil very English.   The ester profile still seems like the traditional S-04.  I would have thought that the two yeasts would have maybe made a mellower English profile.  The flavor is still good though and I would probably try this blend again when shooting for a well attenuated English styled ale.
Hop flavor did seem a bit diminshed though.  For all the Cascade hops in there I would have expected more bitterness.  But the hop “pop” you get when using US-05 alone isn’t there.  Again, this sort of profiles the English yeast again.  I think the bitterness and flavor gets a little lost with the roasty malts and the ester profile of the S-04.

Head formation and retention seemed to be normal for either yeast.

Overall, then I don’t think that the blend really gave me something in between the US and English profiles.  Perhaps the clean-ness of the US-05 just still lets the S-04 character shine through.  While this is not an extensive test (and I hate making and reading about one time experiments as a definitive answer), I found the results useful.  I will definitely try this experiment again as working with the dried yeasts is easy.  A great test for this “co-flocculation” experiment would be to blend some German Hefe-style yeast with S-04 and see how much of that pulls down.  I would not be looking forward to those flavor combinations though.

If it ever warms up here and I get my garden hose unburied from the snow, I’ll brew up the Cascade Pale Ale to accompany the Brown Ale…with the yeast blend for sure.

BREW ON!

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.

I put together a video too.  I need to edit it and then I will post that too. 

I know everyone has been waiting patiently for the results of the KreamyX vs. Corn Sugar experiment.  I just checked a few bottles and they look to be carbing up nicely.  Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.

Well, there hasn’t been any bottle bombs so that’s a positive.

I am planning to put a couple in the fridge tomorrow or Thursday, (one of each priming agent) and this weekend, we’ll pop ‘em open and see what’s what.

If you are tuning in late, here are the details of this homebrewing experiment.

UPDATE:  Here are the results of the experiment!