4th Time Brewing and I have questions on whether I did an ok job since it has been a while since the last time I did this and I still consider myself a noob. Aiming for a, darker and higher in alchohol style, American Pale Ale with some citrus hops for citrus flavoring. My last brew was an American Pale Ale and I enjoyed it but was looking for a darker and more alchohol styled brew. The kind people at the local homebrew shop gave me the following advice on a recipe: CBM Golden Light Liquid Malt Extract - 3.3lb CBM Sparkling Amber Liquid Malt Extract - 3.3lb Plain Amber Dry Malt Extract - 3lb Caramel Grains Milled 90L - 1lb Willamette Hops - 1oz Citra Hops - 1oz Safale US Dry Ale Yeast and Priming Sugar. All of my equipment was washed/rinsed, and sanitized with Star San. Equipment includes: Kettle Primary Fermentation Glass Carboy Secondary Fermentation Bucket with Spigot Siphon Thermometer Hydrometer around 40 bottles (Dishwasher washed and Hand-washed each bottle after with detergent) Large pack of bottle caps and the pack that holds them. Air Lock/Stopper Large Kitchen Strainer Smaller Sink Strainer Small Funnel I put the kettle on until 155 degrees fahrenheit and started steeping the caramel grains for around 18 minutes stirring periodically. When the temperature got around 170, I turned down the heat in order to keep it from boiling while steeping. Removed the grain bag and continued until boil. Once boiled at 220 degrees fahrenheit, added the DME, LME, and Willamette Hops and continued to stir occasionally watching for any foam overflow. At just before 5 minutes to the end, I added the Citra hops and stirred it in. Hops were added without a muslin bag, just directly into the pot. Sink was filled with cold water and what little ice I had. Placed kettle in the cooling sink and took about 30-40 minutes to bring down to 80 degrees. Put just below 2.5 gallons of cold Brita filtered water in the glass carboy (primary fermentor). Was I supposed to add water to the primary fermentor? Recipe from the store didn't call for it but online recipes all said to add 2.5 gallons of water? As I started to siphon the wert from the kettle to primary fermentor, I realized I didn't have a solid way of straining out the gunk so I struggled at this part. I used the small funnel and the sink strainer but the funnel overflowed pretty quickly ending up with wert on my floor (another disaster I won't get into). I ended up allowing all of the wert into the primary fermentor without straining out the gunk because of the spill. Is my brew safe even though it wasn't strained? Do you have to strain for primary fermentation phase? Isn't the straining for the secondary fermentation phase? The recipe from the store didn't call for straining. Again I used the online sources. Now that the wert is in the primary fermentor, I placed it where it is going to sit for the duration of fermentation and took my first hydrometer reading which was 1.070. I then pitched the dry yeast. The dry yeast didn't say anything about preparation of the yeast so I just pitched it in the wert directly from the packet. Since it was a little difficult to stir in my glass carboy, I may have shaken the carboy a bit to stir it in. Could I have hurt the brew by shaking the carboy after the yeast was pitched? Are you supposed to stir the yeast into the wert? Is there a certain time-frame you have to seal up the primary fermentor before the brew goes bad? Minutes may have passed by the time I pitched the yeast and sealed it for good and am just worried I may have hurt the brew. How do I know if the place I am storing the primary fermentation is too warm or too cold? I shouldn't open the airlock and check the temperature right? It's sitting in my living room underneath a fish tank. Now I was told to wait 7-10 days and start the secondary fermentation which is all sanitized and ready to go but maybe I will wash/rinse/sanitize again when the time comes. Excuse me if I used any of the terminology incorrectly. How did I do?
You're fine. Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew. Sounds like your procedure was pretty good. You will have no problems with 'gunk' in the fermenter. It won't hurt anything. Shaking the fermenter isn't bad - not to get the yeast in (that part is irrelevant) but you do want to get some air (specifically oxygen) into solution for the yeast to "breathe." The thing to worry at all about is temperature. Don't worry too much about getting the exact temp inside, but just ambient. Keep it somewhere in the mid 60's is perfect (and out of light) Any thermometer should be able to tell the temp. Last thing, current thinking is to do without the secondary - it doesn't really help too much unless you are doing some kind of bulk aging, with souring bugs, or wood, fruit or the like. If you do go ahead with secondary, best bet would be to sanitize again - it won't stay sanitary for the entire time. Last thing, don't open the lid for anything. Just keep an eye to make sure your airlock doesn't dry up, or blow out the top. OTher than that, let it ride for a couple weeks minimum (I personally prefer about 18 days,) then check gravity. Seal it back up for another 3 days, then check again. If the gravity is the same, then you're good to go bottling. Also, best bet is to not use dish detergent on the bottles - it can leave residue that can affect the beer. When it's time, rinse well and sanitize just before filling.
[I see that @JrGtr stepped in with a lot of the same advice, but I'm leaving it here in case I've included some nuance that might help.] You actually did okay, by my reading. Here are things that are not issues: 1. The delay between getting your beer into the carboy and pitching the yeast. Not a problem. If it were going to sit for hours before you pitched the yeast, I would cover it to keep any bugs from getting in, but a few minutes is just not an issue. 2. Adding the gunk to the carboy. A lot of people do this. It's maybe not ideal, and it may shorten the shelf-life of your beer, but it's not a big deal. 3. Simply adding a dry packet of yeast without preparation. Some people will tell you it's better to rehydrate the yeast in warm water first, but simply adding the yeast is a technique that many people use successfully, and anyway the difference is minor. A packet of US-05 dry yeast should have a sufficient cell count for your purposes. Not a problem. 4. Shaking the beer after adding the yeast. Not a problem. If anything, the problem here is that you didn't shake enough - at that stage, people often shake the carboy vigorously to get as much oxygen into solution as possible. (Just be careful if you are using a glass carboy. I recommend switching to a Better Bottle.) 5. Adding water to the carboy. The issue here is whether you needed to add water to hit an appropriate original gravity. At 1.070, it sounds as though you did just fine. Now, personally I would probably have used water that had been boiled and cooled down in this situation. But I've used tap water in the past without issue. (The risk is the possibility of infection from something in the water. I don't know how to quantify that, but I'd say it's not a huge risk given that the yeast are going to start producing a lot of alcohol very quickly.) Now a few issues/potential issues. 1. Probably the best advice I could give you is to get a little more rigorous about your knowledge and procedures. If you've brewed 4 times, it must be a hobby that you like, and so I would invest some time reading John Palmer's How to Brew and planning out your brew day a little more carefully. Sometimes relatively minor things can have a big impact on the beer, and so a little up-front investment can pay for itself very quickly. 2. An example of something that can have a big impact on the beer is fermentation temperature. Especially with a beer like this one, there is a risk that if the fermentation is too hot you will get off-flavors and unpleasant "fusel alcohols" (which will diminish over time, but too slowly and too incompletely to be ignored). Get the beer somewhere with an ambient temperature in the 60s and you should be okay. The good news here is that US-05 is relatively "clean" and actually produces some nice, peachy flavors if it ferments a little warm. (But still, if the ambient temperature is in the 70s, that's likely too warm.) 3. You should be a little more selective about sanitizing your equipment. First of all, your "hot side" equipment (in this case, really just your kettle) does not need to be sanitized. The boil will suffice to kill any microbes that it might harbor. Also, it was a little early to sanitize your bucket and your bottles. Those should be sanitized on bottling day. 4. Speaking of which, I wouldn't recommend a "secondary fermentation." When the beer is done fermenting (3 weeks should do it), just sanitize your bucket, add your beer, add a solution of priming sugar dissolved in water, and stir well with a sanitized spoon. Then just fill your (sanitized) bottles, cap them, let them sit at room temperature for 2 weeks, refrigerate, and enjoy.
Thanks for your input guys, I really appreciate it... How come both of you recommend not doing a secondary fermentation? I mentioned avoiding the secondary fermentation at the store but the guy there recommended that I do do the secondary fermentation (maybe he thought I was a noob which I guess I am or is it not just for noobs?).
I voted for the "other type of water" because I use water from the tap. My water source is well water, so I don't have to worry about chlorine. The water does not taste hard, etc. but I've never had it analyzed for the purposes of brewing beer. My beers taste pretty good, so I think my water is one of my least worries. When adding the water, I boil it and let it cool, so its coolness can help bring down the temp of the wort. I usually put most of it in the boil kettle along with my wort chiller in an attempt to get the wort down to the proper temp asap. OP, you've received some good advice above, one piece being to read How to Brew by John Palmer. If you don't want to purchase the book, it is available online as an earlier edition at howtobrew.com. The online version is said to have only minimal differences to the book version that is on store shelves.
I haven't read through that thread that @scurvy311 linked to - I'm sure it's good, but it does look a little long. A shorter answer is that most people view secondary fermentations the same way doctors view medical procedures. [Edited to add: the term "secondary fermentation" is actually misleading, and I shouldn't have used it. In a "clean" fermentation - no brett, no bugs - the fermentation is done in a week or two. The yeast have a little "clean up" work to do, but even that should be done before very long, and anyway it will happen as easily in "primary" as in "secondary." There isn't some biologically distinct thing that happens once you've racked the beer off of the trub, unless you add something: microbes like brett or bugs, or fruit containing enough sugar to get the yeast active again.] That is, the principle is "First do no harm." Transferring your beer to secondary is an opportunity to oxidize it, infect it, spill it, etc. (The same way surgery, even minor surgery, is an opportunity to give the patient an infection, etc.) Of course, there are situations in which transferring to secondary is called for. But just as a doctor isn't going to order a surgery unless there's a compelling reason to do so, homebrewers these days generally don't transfer to secondary absent a compelling reason. The default option is just to rack it straight from primary into the bottling bucket, and this is what people on this forum would advise you to do the vast majority of the time. On the other hand, the big compelling reason to transfer to secondary is because there is something you want to do to the beer before it is in the bottle, and if you leave it in primary too long it will get off-flavors from the trub. So for instance, if you want to add some kind of fruit or oak or something, you might transfer to secondary for that purpose. Or you might transfer in order to let a beer sour (although for some sour styles, such as lambic, you can let it sour in primary). Or you want to blend beers from several batches. But a beer like this one - a clean beer, with nothing more to do once the fermentation is done - is not a good candidate for transferring to secondary, and so the reaction you're going to get from people like me and @scurvy311 is to skip it.
Speaking of long answers, skip the secondary unless you are oaking, fruiting, or long term aging (like over 8weeks generally speaking).
Btw I voted distilled. You are using mostly extract so the minerals are already there. But conventional wisdom says if your water tastes good that's good enough. "I brewed early on, Was going for good enough, And that's what I got." Humbletron Haiku
Did the guy at the store say why he recommended a secondary? If so, hopefully he stopped short of saying you need to do one. You don't. (FWIW, many Local Home Brew Stores (LHBSs) are staffed by uninformed or misinformed employees. Not all. But many.)
Voted distilled if you are using extract. The recipe looks way off to me. My guess is you are going to have a very sweet beer with little balance. All of the amber malt and the 1 LB of caramel 90L need to be offset with IBUs if you want it to even come close to a pale ale. Estimated IBUs are around 20. Style guidelines list pale ales at 30-45+ IBU with an abv of 4.5-6%. If you up the ABV you should probably up the IBUs also for balance. The good thing about home brewing is you can do what ever you want. Nothing wrong with tweaking a style to make it fit what you like. My suggestion would be to brew proven recipes or kits first. Get a good base of knowledge and then go from there. My only bad batch came from one of the first recipes I created. The book Brewing Classic Styles helped me a lot in the beginning understand each style and gives a few proven recipes for each one that you can brew or tweak to your liking. With all of that said I wish you the best of luck with this batch and hope it turns out well.
I use distilled water from the supermarket where you pay to have your container refilled. I have a water softener in my house, and the quality is bad for the yeast I hear. I still need to have it tested though.
So I am back to get some advice on how I am doing.. I noticed on day 12 and 13 that the airlock stopped its bubbling to around once every 70 seconds which I realize probably doesn't completely show that the fermentation has stopped but I got a little worried and took a reading which was now 1.018 down from 1.070. I checked back 3 days later, day 16, and the reading was the same so I decided to start bottling. Not sure if day 16 was too long or too short of a period to start bottling? The siphon, bottling bucket, bottles, big spoon and bottle caps were sanitized with starsan. I boiled 5oz of priming sugar in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes. I did not mix the priming sugar in until after the wort was completely siphoned from the primary fermentor to the bottling bucket (maybe that was a mistake too). But due to sanitizing the bottles with star-san, there was a bit of foam in every bottle. I believe from reading other peoples posts this wont be a problem? Also bottles have been stored for 3 days now and have developed a small layer of yeast sediment at the bottom. Is this normal? Other than that I am hoping these come out good and the star-san doesn't kill people. Thanks for helping everyone!
I don't see in your previous posts that you ended up with 5 gallons, just a reference that you added 2.5 gallons after the boil. Did you get a good measurement as to whether you are close to 5 gallons for that amount of priming sugar to work well? And the sugar syrup tends to want to settle out of the beer in the bottling bucket, so a few gentle stirs during the bottling process is recommended in order to get a fair amount of sugar into each bottle. Otherwise you'll have some bottles with little carbonation, and some that will be over-carbed.
My water comes from a well. Unlike a lot of well water profiles, mine has a pretty low ionic strength, so I build the chemistry to suit the beer. There is no chlorine or chloramine added, so no need to filter.
I chose "other" as I use RO and build it up to my style. Every now and the. When I feel lazy I'll just do 75% RO and then 25% charcoal filtered tap water; as it is so hard it adds enough to get the job done for most any brew. But I prefer to build the water to spec; I like to control every variable possible to enhance my experience and the finished product. Quit counting bubbles; it is a waste of time that should be better utilized. Bubbles mean nothing except Co2 is off gassing. Use your instruments; hydrometer; that's what they are for.
