Brew Dudes

I bottled up the Cali Common last night.   I have been playing around with priming sugar quantities.

The blonde ale that I brewed was undercarbonated.  I think I just went with the 3/4 cup of corn sugar in a pint of water formula.  The carbonation was pretty disappointing.

This time I tried to calculate using the temperature of the beer at bottling to understand how much priming sugar I would need to get the beer to get the target carbonation I am looking for.

I used 6.5 ounces of corn sugar.  I boiled it for 15 minutes in a covered pot and cooled it to room temperature.  I added the mixture to my bottling bucket and bottled and capped as usual.

I’ll let you know how the carbonation is in 2 weeks.  It should be a little more bubbly than the blonde.

So I know we have talked about skipping the secondary on this blog.   For the most part, we follow our own advice.  For lagers, I tend to not follow that advice and I do rack to a secondary vessel to give the beer some time to condition.

This time around, it had another purpose. I needed some time between primary fermentation and bottling because I have to clean and sanitize some bottles.  This secondary phase will give me some time to do that while the beer is chilling out.

So I prepared a carboy and racked the California Common on Tuesday night.  I checked the gravity and was surprised to see that it was giving me a 1.008 reading.  I had expected a final gravity reading of 1.012, so the yeast really did their thing and then some.

The starting gravity was a little higher than expected, probably around 1.052.  I was shooting for a 1.050 but no harm there.

I put the carboy in the beer fridge and I have been slowly reducing the temperature over the last few days.  I think we are sitting at 45°F right now and we started at 60°F.  By the weekend, it will be down to 35°F and I will let it stay there for a week or so.