I took a gravity sample tonight. As I suspected, the beer has reached 1.016 after just five days, and thats including a 24hr lag time for dry yeast. It has excellent aroma, a rocky head and a very firm bitterness. No sign of diacetyl or other green flavors other than a yeastiness. It might not be quite as black as I wanted but its tough to judge color since the sample had yeast in it. I’m going to keep it at 10psi for another couple of days, then bleed pressure and harvest yeast then dial up the pressure. I might add some priming sugar to ensure adequate carbonation, and maybe some gelatin to speed the clearing.
1.072 to 1.016 in five days, thats fast. 78% attenuation is a perfect result as far as I’m concerned.
Carbed or nearly carbed, and I can use some of the pressure to purge my corny and then do a counter-pressure transfer. I’ll fill the corny by weight and then “top up” the gas with my CO2 bottle. I’ve heard of a person or two, serving out of their fermentors. You can do this with a corny or sanke, you just have to live with the batch sizes slightly lower than those volumes. For a corny, if you use fermcap and a gastight blowoff setup to another keg, and put your spunding valve on that keg. People are fermenting around 4.5gal and getting around 4gal of finished beer. I’ll be trying this since I’m mostly a small batch brewer.
How did the cooling setup work out for you?
Seems like it would be really effecient,
Like having a heating element submerged vs flames pointed at the bottom, only cold.
Kind of hard to tell how it worked, it certainly isn’t fast. The basement is so cool, I ended up turning it off after day three to avoid having the yeast drop early. I’m going to turn it back on now, I want the beer to clear. I’m at FG, so I’m torn between just keeping it at 10psi and racking to kegs, or opening the fermentor and dropping in some priming sugar for carbonation in tank. If I do that I’ll harvest some yeast and then pitch in some dry hops and gelatin. I’ve been lazy about it, with the holidays going on and all.
I turned the chiller back on yesterday and it brought the temp down about 5F from ambient. Today I purged a keg with the pressure from the Brewhemoth, then harvested some yeast through the dump valve. That went well, very easy. Cleaned up the dump valve with a sprayer bottle full of Starsan.
I bled the remaining pressure off and opened the top of the fermentor, dumped in some gelatin and an ounce of Cascade hops for a modest dry hopping. Resealed and pressurized to 30psi with CO2 from my tank, I decided not to go the priming sugar route this time.
Update. Yesterday I got my barbed triclamp fitting so I hoooked up a transfer hose this morning and filled two tanks using counter-pressure transfer. First time I’ve done that, worked really slick. Used my spunding valve as the pressure relief valve on the keg, and a bathroom scale to tell how much beer was transferred. Tried to go slow by adjusting the pressure so it was just a mild hiss, the Brewhemoth was at 28psi and I ran the relief valve at about 20psi. Still must’ve had a little foam because I blew some foam out the relief valve both times. Easy enough to clean up, just grabbed another keg and added a little Starsan then pressurized and put the relief valve on the out post to blow the sanitizer through.
Saw a few small clumps of trub come through the transfer line on the first keg, mostly clear on the second. The beer looked really clear too, of course since it was fined it should be. I put one keg in the fridge so I’ll be able to have my first pint tonight. I still have a gallon or so in the fermentor that I’ll transfer to a third keg, I will bottle this after bumping up the carbonation a little. Just in case it tastes award-winning of course.
I’m on pint #2 of the black pale ale and I’m happy with some aspects and not so much with others.
First of all, there are no faults in the beer, the fermentation went just fine and finished completely. The color is deeper than I thought, I can’t see a light across a pint glass. It may need to clear a bit, I think it will. Theres little black malt flavor coming through which is exactly what I wanted. Theres a restrained hop aroma, certainly not the level I was going for. I have to get used to brewing large batches I guess, that 1oz of dry hops seems have got lost for the most part. The malt flavor is restrained, a hint of chocolate and less biscuit than I was hoping for. The bitterness is medium, also lower than I wanted. Overall the beer is a little muddled but that may clear up as the beer clears. Its certainly drinkable though, and I have a clear way forward on the recipe.
The biggest thing that I am dissappointed about is that the malt flavors aren’t more distinct, I was thinking a total lack of oxidation might generate a different level of malty flavors than I’ve gotten from conventional bucket brewing.
