What's Brewing - June '17 edition

Normally I would not. But I ended up with more wort than I expected, so I had actually split the wort for primary fermentation, with 5 gallons in 6 gallon carboy in the picture plus another 1+ gallon or so in my 3 gallon carboy, so I wouldn't have any issues with blowing the airlock with an aggressive fermentation.

So I was combining into one 6 gallon carboy for dry-hopping.

 

Bottleing the second half of Michelle's stout aged on nibs,oak maple and additional cinnamon.

 

I bottled this one on Sunday. Seemed like it was pretty murky and had a lot of particluates floating in it, but it smelled great and the gravity sample wasn't half bad. I'm a little disappointed with the FG though it came out a bit high (1.018 versus 1.013 predicted). Now I get to play the waiting game to see how it turns out.

 

Sounds like that beer is all over the place! How long has it been fermenting? Doesn't sound finished to me...what was the measured OG? That yeast should attenuate much better than that. If you didn't allow it to finish fermentation, you just made a batch of bottle bombs!

 

OG was 1.068 (so 3 points higher the expected), and it had 15 days before I bottled it. I took two gravity measurements at day 12 and day 14 and they both read 1.018. I'm not entirely sure what's going on with my attenuation, seems like every batch finishes higher than expected (as calculated by vikemans brewcipher, though it doesn't include the exact yeast strain I used). I was actually thinking about starting a thread looking for advice on the attenuation.

 

@marknu1 Great, thanks a lot! I've done some looking around and I saw Westmalle yeast was a possibility as well. If I ever get around to it maybe I'll try to replicate what you do but instead use Westmalle and then compare notes. That corking part sounds cool. I've never done that before. Looks like I'll need to get myself a corker!

 

Excellent. I look forward to how yours turns out. I did see the Westmalle strain mentioned. Off the top of my head, I don't recall which one that is. White Labs or Wyeast?

This is the corker I got:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002P0SF2I

It's about $10 more than most of the other Portuguese corkers, but this one has a metal bottle platform, whereas the others are plastic. I figured it was worth the extra money. I've only test-corked a few bottles, just to figure out what I was doing, but it seems super solid.

 

Have you calibrated your thermometer lately?

 

Agreed on your reasoning for this.

That said, I always rack onto my dry hops in a clean fermenter and I don't purge it with CO2. Couple reasons for this. The beer gets off the trub and I use leaf hops, so if I just drop them into the fermenter a lot of them won't make contact with the beer, even taking into consideration capillary action. Add to that that I usually do two, 3 - 5 day dry hops (with 2 x 3 oz. of hops in a 5.5 gallon batch) and I'm going to need to rack the beer anyway.

Additionally, I'm one of those old school holdovers that always racks the beer when active primary fermentation is almost finished, so you can see that I've got no issue with this technique.

 

No I haven't. I have a cheaper bimetallic thermometer and I was starting to wonder how accurate it is. The trouble with calibrating it is I need some standard to calibrate against, and I don't have another thermometer I trust more. I guess I could boil water and check that, but that varies by impurities and atmopsheric pressure at the time (not sure if the magnitude of the changes matter with the level of accuracy we are dealing with here). How far off do you think the thermometer needs to be to effect fg by 5 or so points?

 

A few degrees off could make your 152 156 which would have enough effect to make a 5 point difference. I got a lab thermometer from the LHBS for like $8 and use that to calibrate all my other thermometers.

 

If the FG of every batch (or almost every batch) finishes higher than predicted, you can tweak the Attenuation Power Factor (on the Brewhouse Tab) downward until your average deviation is as small as possible. Brewcipher includes more variables in its attenuation calculation than other models, but it also includes a user specified constant (the Attenuation Power Factor) to account for any consistent brewhouse factors that either result from attributes not modeled or from process/measurement differences (e.g. mashout vs no mashout, or the way mash temp is measured, to name a couple).

ETA: but if all these batches that finish high use that same yeast strain, you can just tweak its "Factor" on the YeastLookup tab.

 

Brewed a 10 gallon batch of mosaic azacca simcoe heavy IPA 11 days ago. Pitched the us5 at 76*. I was worried about off flavors but i dryhopped day 5 it finished fermenting 1.066 to1.011 around 78-80* by day 9. Almost carbonated now and tastes amazing. Im truly amazed at how clean and fast the yeast fermented at high temps. I expected it to at least be hot from fusel alcohol... either way I probably won't push my luck again but happy to have a beer ready for a summer party this weekend

 

Brewing a Skull Splitter Wee Heavy clone. Did my yeast starter last night, hoping to brew tomorrow evening.

 

Bottled my Belgian Pale last weekend. Used 3522 Ardennes for the first time and it hit 81% attenuation - a bit more than I expected but should make for an easy drinking summer ale. I started it at 65deg and let it rise slowly to 72.

Next up (after a bit of a break) is the AP/ESB for drinking in the end of summer.

 

Batch 2 of my Strawberry Milkshake IPA. 2lbs/gallon of fresh picked strawberries and 3oz/gallon of mosaic hops. One of my favorite fruited NE style IPAs.

Just went in the keg hopefully be ready for drinking early next week.

 

Just stepped up my BKYeast C2 & C3 Brett isolates. When I got them 2 years ago from a friend they were well beyond prime. I had tried to get them built up many times to no avail. Finally got them to wake up and start fermenting small amounts of wort. Got them on a stir plate in an 80* room in 800ml of 1.030 wort. This should get me the amount of healthy yeast I need to start playing with it.

 

Did you notice any isoamyl acetate or other esters?

 

The Hop Hash Sacc trois IPA kicked last night, so this morning I kegged a Citra and Hop Hash Sacc trois IPA and now I'm about to hit the boil on the exact same recipe as the all Citra Brett IPA I brewed 2 days ago, but I'm going to ferment it with the Sacc trois cake instead of the Brett blend I'm fermenting the other one with.

 

Of course there is another variable in brewcipher, it does everything. I'm not so concerned about hitting the numbers I predict, but it does seem like everything I've been making finishes pretty high. I really haven't made any attempt to customize brewcipher to my system, so I'm not surprised when things don't quite line up, but I would like to figure out why my worts seem to be less fermentable. My current guesses are grain bills, mash temp (as effected by thermometer inaccuracies), and water chemistry (I use untreated tap water). I'm sure there are more factors that could be the culprit but those come to mind.