December Homebrewing

Some yeast will do the unexpected. Twice I've brewed a batch with Wyeast 1187 (Ringwood) and then fermented a second beer on the yeast cake from the first beer. Both times the second batch had much higher than expected fermentation. Here are the details:

First time:
First beer: 1.061 OG, 1.015 FG --> AA = 76%
Second beer: 1.074 OG, 1.013 FG --> AA = 83%

Second time:
First beer: 1.044 OG, 1.011 FG --> AA = 75%
Second beer: 1.056 OG, 1.009 FG --> AA = 83%

All of these beers were typical-grist ales: all malt including with at least a little bit of crystal. Mash temperature either 150 or 151 with mash times between 1 and 2 hours.

@VikeMan, if you want further details for use in your yeast modeling in BrewCipher, let me know.

Cheers!

 

Brewing a Quadrupel on Christmas Day, never done one before...we'll see,

 

After a five-month hiatus from brewing, finally getting the pipeline going again. A batch of my house ESB got brewed yesterday. It joins an Alpine Nelson Clone brewed two weeks ago that is just about ready for DH's.

 

Bottled 10 gallons of Oktoberfest today and finalized my recipe for next weekend's Pilsner. I brew more often in winter than any other season (what else is there to do on a cold Ohio winter day off?). So my plan is to bottle my lagers and intersperse with some ales for more immediate drinking. I strangely enjoy a bottling day every now and then (even though I spent 2 hours bottling 110 bottles), though I'm sure by the end of winter I'll be dreading it.

 

Final check on my Pale... FG of 1.011 (Target of 1.008) but I'm OK with that. Tastes fantastic! Will start cold crashing tonight for kegging on Tuesday.

Also tweaked my next recipe a bit, a Pilsner that I will be brewing next weekend.

 

It's been nice to have the last week and change off from work for the holidays! Here's my homebrewing tally since my last post in early December...
-Brewing a Chinook heavy NE IPA right now
-Brewed the 5th version of my house Citra Wild IIPA
-Brewed a basic golden sour to add back into the Whiskey Sour barrel
-Brewed a Moteuka single hop IPA
-Brewing a hoppy imperial Kolsch tomorrow
-Hope to also brew a New Zealand hopped DIPA before next Monday as well
-Kegged a Whiskey Sour (Lime Sour fermented in a funky/sour whiskey barrel)
-Kegged a Topaz single hop IPA
-Kegged a Wild yeast version of my house IPA (Citra and Nelson heavy)
-Kegged a Brett Saison
-Kegged a German hopped (Polaris, Mandarina Bavaria and Huell Melon) DIPA
-Kegged a Columbus single hop Wheat IPA

Cheers and happy holidays all!!!

 

• Bottling my premium bitter today. 3rd generation 1968 took it down to 1.003 despite mashing at 153 and having 6% crystal malt in the grist.
• Brewing an old ale today. Strike water is heating up currently. I'm not planning on adding any brett to it but I'll be aging it in one of my brett carboys so it might pick up something while it's aging for the better part of 2017

 

Slacker.

 

Racked a Munich/Mosaic SMaSH off of dry hops.


Wad O' Pellet Sludge.

 

Kegged iteration No. 10 of my NEIPA last Wednesday. Moved it to the keezer to cold crash it last night.

Something was different about this one in a very bad way. The sample I grabbed for my final gravity reading was horribly astringent and bitter. I'm hoping that leaving it in the keg @ room temp for another week + cold crashing has helped. But alas... only time will tell!

I'm tempted to crank up the carbonation so I can sample sooner, but I'm heeding the advice of most here: Set it and forget it.

Cheers!

 

Pale Ale is fermenting away and Duvel clone is resting in the keg. I think I'll let that one sit a while and tap the Pale Ale once its ready. I also cleaned all of the tap lines, it's been a while. Have had lots of company the last week so lots of home brew being consumed. So far no complaints.

 

@VikeMan - I see you're using that Spunding Valve doohickey thing. What is the benefit of using that with a closed transfer vs. just opening the PRV a bit? Curious.

 

Well, at the very least, I don't have to stand there holding the PRV open. Also, with the spunding, I know for sure there's nothing sneaking back in.

 

Got it, thanks for the reply. I guess you could throw in "spunding valves are cool" too.

 

Brewed a bourbon county clone yesterday. Collected 12 gallons of wort and boiled down to 5.5 gallons. Almost a 6 hour boil. OG was 1.150 at the end of the boil. I added 2 packs of US-05 that were put on a 2L starter at 1.04. I'm afraid that I may off severely underpitched. I used pure oxygen and re-oxygenated this morning. Not seeing much activity. I may need to re-pitch some more yeast!

 

Just got a 1.5L starter on the stirplate (to be stepped to 3L) of WLP800 for a Pilsner I'll brew this Sunday. This is the third time I've used this same yeast, harvested/collected from a starter of a previous beer (I make about 100-150B extra cells for collection). So much easier than harvesting from a finished beer!

 

Brewed a not-very-pale ale with only Belma hops today. Prompt Airlock activity, fermenting with WLP565 Belgian Saison.

Old Rasputin clone is ready to bottle.

Pre-prohibition is now lagering for 6 weeks.

 

05 should die off before finishing that beer...most sacc species can't ferment much over 12% or so at the most. I would expect that beer to finish around 1.060 or so, when it hits around 12%, and leave you with a very sweet beer, unless you're going to ferment with some sort of liquor or champagne yeast to try to drop the FG further.

 

I don't know much about distiller yeast strains, but I wouldn't expect champagne yeast to help much, since it can't use maltotriose and is not good at using maltose. Together, these two sugars make up well over half of the sugars in a typical beer wort. And it's somewhat likely that when an ale yeast strain has quit (hit its ABV tolerance limit or whatever), the remaining sugars may be disproportionally higher in maltose/maltotriose, because the original ale strain may tend to eat the easy (simpler) sugars first.

 

FWIW, I got good results with WLP099 on a barleywine that was 15%. Good carbonation in the bottles too.