Brewing

I watched the secondary fermentation tank for a while and am not seeing any signs of fermentation. I hope this only means that the sugar was all converted last week in the primary. I may check the specific gravity later today or tomorrow morning if I do not see any carbon dioxide bubbling off.

Today I siphoned the beer from the primary brew keg into a glass carboy for the secondary fermentation. I actually started last night by sterilizing the carboy. I filled it with a dilute solution of chlorine bleach and let it sit all night with the solution in it. This morning, I emptied it and then rinsed it twice before letting it drain for a while. I had a couple cups of coffee and then proceeded to sterilize the racking equipment (siphon, etc.), the stopper and airlock for use with the carboy. After all of this was done, I pried the top off of the primary keg. I mean pry too -- even with a tool I purchased to get the top off, it was difficult. When I got it off, the smell was fabulous! I think I can now state that it is actually beer in there! Looking into the keg, there is a lot of sediment from the yeast. The beer is fairly dark in color. I then placed the carboy on the floor beneath the keg and and inserted the racking tube. The one I bought has a manual priming pump to get the siphon started, so I placed the soft plastic siphon tube down into the carboy and pump started the siphoning process. It took a bit over five minutes for the beer to transfer from the primary keg to the carboy. While it siphoned, I moved the end of the siphon around so that it would splash air into the beer for further fermentation [later update -- do not splash the beer at this point -- you do not want to introduce oxygen into it now -- only at the very beginning to get the yeast started]. When it was done, there was about a half inch left in the primary keg, but it was mostly sediment from the yeast you wouldn't want to transfer. The racking tube has a device that fits on its end that keeps you from drawing from the very bottom so you won't get the sediment.



After the carboy was filled, I lifted it up to the table and stoppered it with the airlock in place. I then rinsed and wiped down the primary keg and cleaned all of the siphoning equipment. Next Friday or Saturday, I will start monitoring the specific gravity to see if the brewing has stopped, after which it will be time to bottle the beer.

Not a lot going on in the brew keg to see lately. The fermentation appears to be slowing, so I hope that means that most of the sugar has been processed by the yeast. The airlock started to bubble on Monday, the day after I had pitched the yeast in. The airlock bubbled about once every two seconds or so for most of Tuesday and Wednesday. Today, Thursday, it has slowed to once every eight seconds or so. I did manage to catch a bubble coming through the airlock with my camera though as you can see in the picture at the left. I plan to siphon the beer into a carboy for the second fermentation on Sunday.

Sorry to be so slow to write my progress report. Friday everything arrived that I had been waiting for (see my earlier post). Saturday afternoon, I lined up everything for the boil of my wort (wort is what will become the beer after the yeast works on it). I set up a small basin in the kitchen sink with a solution of chlorine bleach to sterilize everything and took my fermentation tank (a large 6 1/2 gallon plastic bucket) to the bathroom and filled it with a solution of chlorine bleach to sterilize it as well.

The utensils used in the boil need not be sterilized because the high temperature of the boiling wort will kill any stray bacteria or yeast that comes it's way (probably a very good thing since I also make my own bread in the kitchen).I decided that the tap water from Raleigh probably wasn't the best for brewing beer and used a water filtration pitcher I have to filter the water for starters.

After thoroughly rinsing the fermentation tank, I put 2 1/2 gallons of water in it and another 2 1/2 gallons in my boiling pot (the pot is a 4 gallon stainless steel pot). I put the thermometer in the pot and brought it up to a temperature of 155 degrees (fahrenheit). The first stage of the process is to cook what are called the "specialty grains" by the company that put the recipe kit together. They are to provide both flavor and color to the finished beer. I asked to have mine crushed, so I didn't need to crush them myself before using them. The package had about 10 to 12 ounces of grain in it which I poured into the nylon boiling back I had purchased. This was lowered into the pot of water which was now up to 155 F (I tied the drawstring for the bag to one of the pot handles so I could easily grab them to dunk the bag in and out of the water to keep water flowing around the grain.

This process lasted for one half hour. After squeezing all the water out of the grain that I could, I dumped the grain into the trash and rinsed the bag out for use with the hops in the next step.The next step was to add the malt extract to the pot. Malt extract is a very heavy, sticky syrup that does not pour very well at room temperature, so I had placed the bottle of extract (it came in a 1/2 gallon plastic bottle) in a pot full of very hot water to make it easier to pour while I was cooking the specialty grains earlier. I turned the burner off under the boiling pot so I would not scorch the malt extract on the bottom of the pot as I added it. Having heated it, it poured pretty well and I got as much out of it as I could and then immersed the bottle of extract in the still hot water and got as much of the rest of it out as I could before discarding the bottle.

After stirring the pot to mix the extract into the water, I turned the burner on high to bring it up to boiling temperature (212 F). It took a while to get up to that temperature, but it eventually started a nice rolling boil. There are two one ounce packages of hop pellets with the recipe kit. Both are of the same type. One is called the bittering hops and I put them into the nylon bag and lowered them into the wort for the entire hour long boil. Their purpose is to reduce the sweetness of the beer.

It is necessary to monitor the boil continuously for a couple of reasons. First, you do not want to scorch the malt extract on the bottom of the pot and secondly, it is very easy to have a boil-over if you don't keep it stirred all of the time. I experienced a boil-over in the past and it is a real mess to clean up as sticky as the wort is. So, I cracked open a beer (or two by the time an hour was up) and kept my eye on the pot and stirred it for an hour. At the end of the hour, I added the other package of hops for the last two minutes of boiling. They are the aroma hops and give the beer the smell of hops that is so familiar. After the two minutes, I turned the burner off and removed the nylon bag containing the hops.I was now ready to put the wort into the fermentation tank. You can just pour it from the pot into the tank, but this could get sloppy with spills, so I siphoned it from the pot into the tank. This not only prevents spills, but it reduces the amount of grain and hops debris that end up in the fermentation keg as well. When I had transferred the wort from the pot, the keg was about 3/4 gallon short of being a full five gallons, so I added filtered water to bring it up to the five gallon mark. The wort has to be cooled to room temperature or there abouts before the yeast is added. Since I do not have a wort chiller (an immersion heat exchanger that basically is about 30 feet of copper tubing through which cold water flows), I covered the fermentation keg to keep stray yeast and bacteria away from it and let it sit overnight. Before ending the day, I removed the liquid yeast from the refridgerator to let it get to room temperature as well.Sunday morning, the wort was down to room temperature (I keep my apartment at about 72 degrees with air conditioning -- our summer temperature is usually about 90 F during the afternoons, so air conditioning is almost a necessity). I removed the top from the brew keg and before I opened the bottle of yeast, I took a specific gravity of the wort. It measured 1.038. On another scale, it indicated that the potential alcohol by volume was 5%. When I measure it at the end of fermentation, I should be able to subtact the value it gets to to determine the actual alcohol content. The yeast had been working in the bottle and actually fizzed when I opened it. I poured it into the brew keg and, after sterilizing the top again and inserting the air lock, I put the top onto the brew keg firmly to keep any air from entering from the outside during fermentation.There it sits now -- I looked at it this morning (Monday, a day after adding the yeast) and can see occasional bubbles in the airlock, so the yeast is working. It will sit in the brew keg for about a week at which time I will transfer it to a glass carboy for the second brew. It is now about 4 to 6 weeks before I can start to drink the beer. I guess I will have to buy beer for a few more weeks.

I am worried about my shipment. It is coming in two packages by FedEx and I have the tracking numbers for both. One (weighing in at 57.6 pounds) has arrived in Charlotte, NC. The other (this one is only 20.3 pounds) shows that it left St. Paul, Minnesota, at the same time as the other, but it does not show arriving in Ohio and then being shipped on to Charlotte. Both still show tomorrow as the estimated delivery date. I guess time will tell.

I have decided to start a blog. I am getting back into brewing my own beer in my apartment and will share the experience. I have brewed my own beer in the past, but had to get rid of my equipment when I moved here to North Carolina from the Chicago area just over nine years ago. There just was not enough room for it in the U-Haul trailer. I didn't jump right back into it because I prefer drinking with others and, not knowing anyone around my new home, the only way to do that was to find a nice neighborhood pub and become a regular there. I did that and I really enjoy the friends and bartenders at O'Malley's Pub and Restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina. I have found, however, that I now entertain at home as well and decided that it would be even more fun if I could share beer that I made myself with my friends when they are over. Towards this end, I found an online brewing supply company in Minnesota, Midwest Homebrewing and Winemaking Supplies (website: http://www.midwestsupplies.com/) that appear to have a decent line of products and quite good prices. I have ordered their intermediate brewing kit which includes a carboy for two-stage fermentation, 36 twenty-two ounce bottles (yeah -- they are rather big, wish I could keg it, but the costs are presently out of my price range) and two recipe kits for Liberty Cream Ale. While I would prefer to brew a lager or pilsner style beer, I do not have the ability to keep the brew keg at the required lower temperature to do this correctly and have settled for a beer that can be brewed at room temperature (at least room temperature when you have air conditioning). My entire order for equipment, bottles, caps and recipe kits with shipping came to $196.70. I guess I will have to brew quite a few batches before this will pay off economically. I am sure it will pay off emotionally for me. It would be hard to put into words the enjoyment you get from sharing something you have made with your friends. I won't only be sharing it with friends here at home though. I participate in the World Community Grid (http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/), which is a way of sharing the computer resources you have at home with the world to help solve problems facing humanity worldwide. At present, the project we are running is called the Human Proteome Project, the function of which is to determine how protiens coded by human gene sequences are most likely to fold. I guess this will help researchers to understand how diseases attack our bodies and will help to understand what might prevent the disease from being able to do this. In any event, the software that runs on my computer is totally invisable to me. It takes over my system when I am doing nothing and it backs off any time I have something to do. In order to build spirit to run the projects, the WCG has enabled the members to form teams to compete for points, run time and results and I think I found the best team to join. I became the seventh member of a team that now has a membership 194. It started with a guy and his two daughters and the team is now fourth in points ranking on the WCG. The team is called MyOnlineTeam and you can join it by clicking the team name. We are outperforming several other teams with much larger membership bases and usually are second in daily statistics. Through this project, I am meeting people throughout the world and am enjoying their company online. I hope to share my brewing experiences with a few of them through this, my first attempt at blogging.