My Plan for Second Batch

Thanks! I will... had to slow down a bit due to the other parts of life! Might be brewing this coming weekend if I can find time to get the ingredients and nothing else crops up on the family schedule.

 

I'm hoping to brew tomorrow! I got all my ingredients yesterday and should be ready to go. I decided to stick with dry yeast again rather than the liquid yeast called for in the original recipe - I bought some Danstar Nottingham.

I've got one question for now. I used Mr. Malty's yeast calculator and it says to use 4 grams of dry yeast for 2 gallons at 1.045. Does that seem right? The only reason I ask is that my 1 gallon kit I used for my first batch used more than that for 1 Gallon. I'm guessing the kit had me over pitch??

 

The first kit had an 11g pocket of dry yeast and said to pitch half of it for the one gallon batch. So that is more than double the taste that Mr. Malty's tool is telling me. So that is why I'm just asking for a sanity check to make sure I used the tool correctly. So does the 4g rate seem right for 2 gallons at 1.045?

 

So I brewed today and it went well although I had to improvise a bit.

As for the yeast pitch, despite having calculated the pitch rate it seemed that was intending that amount to be rehydrated and I had not planned on that so at the last minute I had to back away from that approach. I looked at the instructions for Brewers Best one Gallon kit for a similar beer and just double that for my 2 gallons They said to pitch 1 teaspoon of the dry yeast w/o rehydrating so I pitched 2 teaspoons. We'll see if that works... if not I I'll do the rehydrating next time. When I looked at the rehydrating today I saw some folks saying that you should not use distilled water nor should you use water from a water softener and those were my only available sources today... so I did what I could do to move forward and we'll see how it goes - live and learn!

The other issue I ran into was totally unexpected. As I mentioned above I had upgraded to a 3G carboy so I could brew 2 G batches. The stopper I got for this carboy turned out to smell strongly like a goodyear rubber factory! I bought it and the carboy a few weeks ago and today when I was getting ready to brew I got the carboy out, which I had stored with the brand new stopper stuck in it. The carboy smelled strongly like rubber until after I washed it. But no matter what I did to the stopper I couldn't get it to not smell strongly like rubber. Given that it made the inside of my carboy smell I reasoned that it would make my beer smell and taste like rubber so I was not eager to give it try. So... I had to improvise something from the screw-on cap for my 1G carboy, a ziplock bag, some duct tape and a rubber band. I think it will work until I get back to Doc's to get a non-smelly stopper (the smelly one came from the LHBS near my house not from Doc's).

But aside from those things, which I think will turn out ok, all seemed to go well. I had done some water-only testing on my boiling losses with my new kettle and I also got Beer Smith and tried to estimate all the volume conditions it asked for. And... I was pretty much right on my target of 2G into the fermentor!!! I was also pretty close to the projected OG that I got from entering the recipe into Beer Smith: estimated OG was 1.044 and my measured (with the refractometer) was 1.047.

So now it sits in the fermentor and I have to patient... I am worried a bit about some much warmer weather next week so I may have to find an alternate spot for fermenting but we'll see.

And after I got it into the fermentor I celebrated with a bottle from my first batch - and damn it tasted good! So... I'm definitely hooked on this hobby!!!

 

I tried to do something like that at first but realized that I needed to somehow get the plastic wrapping up through the hole in the stopper and that didn't work despite a few attempts with saran wrap. I think this will hold together as long as I don't need to remove it... so as long as I get a non-smelly stopper by the time I need to do my fist FG check I should be ok.

I also thought about doing a blow-off tube with the tube going into the carboy through a ziploc bag that would be attached with a rubber band around the top of the carboy and a second rubber band around the tube... and with the tube sticking a little bit into the neck of the carboy. (Not sure that description is clear!). But then I figured out that my 1G cap just sits firmly on top of the glass "lips" on each side of the carboy opening and all I really needed to was keep in place to some degree and that led to what I did.

To be honest, as an engineer I enjoy these kinds of "uh oh... now what" kind of moments. One of my favorite movie scenes is in Apollo 13 when they have to make a hack so that the square filter can fit into round hole in the filtration system.

Chances are my basement temp will hold steady... but it is something I'm going to keep an eye on and try to have some options ready if I need them!

Thanks again to @Mothergoose03 and @VikeMan for all the help!

 

It is an Irish Red Ale. I'll leave it to others to address your question but from what I've seen you do need to scale the yeast. The right way to do it is using one of the pitch calculators but I think they assume you are rehydrating. So I just pointed on that and based it on looking at what the kids recommend - the amount used for a 1g kit was less than four the 5 gallon kit and it seemed to be about proportionately related so I went with that.

My goal is to move forward on each new batch... The goal on this batch was to increase my batch size to 2G and not use a kit. Next time I'll try to deal with the yeast in a better way - maybe try liquid yeast. All in good time... One step at a time!

 

I checked this morning and I've got fermentation going. Lots of Krausen and I can see some swirling action going on below it. Not seeing any bubbles in my airlock so the CO2 may be escaping from around the edges of my kludged cap contraption. Oh well... nothing I can do about that now until I get a non-stinky stopper Monday after work. Chances are things will be fine but I'll just have to wait and see. If it turns out badly no biog deal - it would have had off flavors if I'd used the stinky stopper so I did the best I could!

 

Yup, that would suck! Thanks for the advice. If I do get a new stopper tomorrow should I (i) try to switch it in tomorrow evening, (ii) switch in some time later, or (iii) just keep running with what I got?

 

I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this... but as soon as I had this batch in the fermentor I was starting to plan my next batch! This is an addictive hobby!!!! So I'm thinking my third batch will be along the lines of Fuller's ESB. I know I'm not going to get something exactly like it but if I'mm in the ballpark I'll be happy. I've already found many recipes on line and I'm working on pulling aspects from a couple to put something together that will work. I'll give more details as I get closer... gotta wait for this batch to come out of the carboy. No... I'm not going to buy another carboy. At least not yet anyway!