First timer: how to brew in 14 days or less?

Haha, whoops. Second mention should be "hydrometer."

 

I make it a practice to taste my hydrometer sample when bottling as a 'quality assurance' test. I look to see if there are any off flavors present which could be due to an infection. residual primary fermentation by-products, etc.

Entirely your choice here whether you want to taste your sample.

Cheers!

 

It should taste like flat beer (but the flavor profile will mature during the bottle conditioning process).

Let's further explore two aspects:

Carbonation

Flat beer will taste a bit 'meh' since carbonation is a flavor 'enhancer' - the bubbles carry aromatics up to your olfactory senses (both directly to your nose but also within your mouth - Retronasal).

Conditioning during the bottle conditioning phase

The beer is going through a genuine secondary fermentation within the bottle. This will further develop and 'round out' the flavor profile.

Don't expect your sample to taste great since it is not carbonated and it has not gone through the conditioning phase detailed above.

Cheers!

 

If you taste any of the flavors in the attached link, something went wrong. Maybe the beer is recoverable with additional time, maybe not. That's why it's always good to let the yeast have a few extra days to clean up their waste products. http://howtobrew.com/book/section-4/is-my-beer-ruined/common-off-flavors

 

First of all, I agree with your decision not to use honey. Honey is an unreliable source of priming sugar because it is a natural product with variable contents. Table sugar is the way to go. Here is a calculator that should do the trick. Note that where you enter temperature, you should enter the highest temperature of the beer since fermentation finished. For you, with your temp control, this should be easy to determine.

Second, you need to figure out your volume of beer to use the calculator. One point I'd make is that if you aim for a middle-of-the-road level of carbonation, like 2.5 volumes, there is a fair amount of tolerance for error. You're not going to blow up your bottles at 2.8 volumes, and 2.2 volumes is still going to taste fine.

So you can just eyeball it. It's an imprecise thing anyway because there's an indeterminate amount of sludge at the bottom of the fermenter, which won't go into the bottling bucket. Basically figure you've got about 0.75 gallons of usable beer there, after removing some for your hydrometer test. If it turns out you've got 0.8 gallons instead, it will be slightly less carbonated. If it turns out you've got 0.7 gallons, it'll be slightly more carbonated. Whatever. (I'm using 0.75 as an example, you should eyeball it.)

But if you want to be a little more rigorous about it, you could weigh the fermenter, weigh your empty fermenter (with the same accoutrements attached) (I'm assuming you've got a second fermenter because you have 2 kits), and take the difference. Figure the beer weights 1.01 grams per milliliter and do the math. Honestly I think this is too much work though, and it lends a kind of false precision because, as noted, you've got to adjust for the sludge, which you have no way of measuring precisely.

You didn't ask, but: you don't need to worry about getting yeast into the bottling bucket to carbonate the beer. There is more than enough yeast still suspended in the beer, even if it looks fairly clear to the naked eye. This is true even for considerably longer primary fermentations. I've had beers in primary for over a month and there was still plenty of yeast in suspension.

[Edited to add: I really don't trust the Brooklyn Brew Shop instructions. Let us know if you want any guidance. The basic process is to boil the sugar in maybe 2/3 cup of water, cool it quickly in a water bath, pour it in your sanitized bottling bucket, and go. But it occurs to me you might not have a bottling bucket, in which case you can use the pan you used for a kettle. In that case you'll be siphoning the beer into the bottles. But I'm getting ahead of myself, let us know if the bottling process is at all unclear.]

 

You must choose the lesser of two evils. Do you want to run the risk of off flavors, or are you willing to serve flat beer? That's a really tricky question. I think it is a given that your beer will not be fully carbonated and it is a given that people will notice that. It is not a given that you will have off flavors, but the risk is high enough to make me concerned. Not everyone tasting the beer may detect the off flavors, if they are present. I always recommend tasting the beer before packaging it, to evaluate if there are off flavors that might warrant more time with the yeast in the fermenter. A forced diacetyl test is a good tool that not many new homebrewers would use. Not too difficult, look it up.

 

Unlike pweis909, I think a bottle of normal (not imperial-strength or super-sour) beer will generally fully carbonate in 10 days. I generally let mine go 14 days, and it's always been sufficient. But 10 days is definitely borderline, hence the hurry to bottle.

The other consideration is that the beer will continue to mature in the bottle. True, once it's off the yeast the process will go a bit more slowly, but as I mentioned there is still quite a bit of yeast in the beer. So it's not as though you're stopping the clock on maturation and starting the clock on carbonation, it's more that you're slowing down maturation while you get carbonation going.

The answer to your first question is yes. If it were possible to brew beer without any yeast/trub/hop debris collecting in the fermenter, I think you could just mix the priming sugar into the primary fermenter. But of course that's not the case. Bottling buckets also often have siphons that make it easier to bottle.

The answer to your second question is, that would work mathematically, but bear in mind you have to boil your priming sugar in water. So there's a chronological problem where you won't know how much sugar to use until you've weighed your beer, by which point it's just sitting there being exposed to oxygen while you measure out your sugar etc. I guess you could contrive to do this pretty quickly (you could already have the water boiling, so it's pretty quick to add sugar, wait for it to dissolve, then take the pot over to the sink for a quick cold-water bath). Or you could have your priming solution made with a known quantity of sugar, and then use whatever percentage of it is called for once you've weighed the beer. These are fine approaches I suppose (the second one seems better than the first, just remember to shake or stir the priming solution so the sugar is evenly distributed before measuring), but personally I would just guess the volume by eye.

 

FTFY. Otherwise I'm unsure what you meant unless you are recommending bottling by using a siphon which the OP would have to do if he uses the boil kettle.

OP, you've been short on a lot of equipment to properly get this beer from kettle to bottle, so I have to ask if you have a bottling wand and some tubing? If not, I can't recommend any other way to get your beer into a bottle without allowing a lot of oxygen to get into the beer.

The link I gave you yesterday about tasting off-flavors in the beer is from John Palmer's book, HowToBrew.com and is a must-read if you want to continue with this hobby. It's free online (1st edition), and really not expensive to buy the book to have the latest edition. Read the section about bottling so you have an idea of what your next step is all about.

Boiling the priming sugar water also gives you the opportunity to top off your beer a little bit with the water that is used. If you estimate that you're a quart short with your beer in the fermenter (you will have to leave a little bit more of the beer behind when you siphon it off of the trub), that's two bottles worth. You can boil your sugar in any amount of water to top off the beer, and the extra water makes for a thinner sugar solution and easier to mix into the beer. But it is important to incorporate that solution evenly into the beer by gentle stirring without creating bubbles. (This is another reason for using a bottling bucket - to stir the beer without trub involved.) If you don't top off the beer, that's okay too. You'll just have a more concentrated version of the beer. But mix that sugar solution into the beer well!

 

No, you got it right. This is how my brain works pre-coffee. [How does your brain work post-coffee? - ed. Shut up.]

Edited to add: Yeah, the Brooklyn Brew Shop kits don't seem to include a bottling wand. For 12 bottles, though, I think you can get by with just a siphon, especially if you have someone to help. Real pain in the ass, but much more doable with 12 bottles than with 50.

 

all this for maybe a quart of home brew?

 

We're hoping/helping to convince him to continue with this hobby after this beer becomes a success. First lesson learned is that you don't get much beer from one gallon batches. Think bigger!

 

....and dipping a toe into the process.

 

From my perspective a 2 gallon batch is a ‘waste’ of time. It basically takes the same amount of time to brew 1, 2, 5 and 10 gallon batches but needless to say as the batch size increases you productivity greatly increases.

I would encourage you to ‘evolve’ to a 5 gallon batch but ultimately this is your decision.

If you decide to proceed with 2 gallon batches maybe a Mr. Beer ‘barrel’ would be appropriate for you since it is of size 2 gallons (a little bit bigger to realize 2 gallons of beer). You could probably get one of these for 25 cents at a yard sale.

Cheers!