Open fermentation experiment. The Belgians know how to do this best, spiders and all. :lol:
On my quest to cut down on any part of my brewing time I decided to use my boil pot to ferment in. So using the MegaPot 1.2™ Brew Kettle with Ball Valve this was my experiment with partial open fermentation (I kept the lid on).
Mashed for 2 1/2 hours ,should have been 1 hour but I was busy in the garden.
Boiled for 1 hour.
I let the hot wort cool down then filtered it, not worrying about any infection because I reboiled it for about 10 minutes .Then left it in the mega pot with the lid off.
The next day I chucked in some safbrew s-33 . Once it had started fermenting I put the lid back on and left it on.
It fermented great. I was ready to bottle and brought it up from the cellar and put it in the garage as the weather had cooled down. I had planned to bottle in a few days but then we had a spike in the weather and the temperature went up a lot. The result was a strong smell of alcohol and a small amount of mold on the top of the wort. I consoled myself by saying it’s only beer and the the Belgians encourage this sort of brewing (I think). I sampled some before bottling and it had a slight sour taste,but not too bad. So I went ahead and bottled straight from the mega pot.
Having only put 1 oz of priming sugar in the batch ( bad experience with over priming on previous batch) it was under carbed but very drinkable and the sour taste had all but gone,or I had become used to it.
Here is the recipe.
6 lbs of Briesse 2 row
8.7 oz English dark crystal (that’s all I had left)
1 oz Briesse black malt
1 lbs Vienna
1 pound dark brown sugar
6 g Apollo
no finishing hops ( i forgot to put them in)
safbrew S-33 yeast.
It was fun doing this and would try it again ( hey it’s only beer)
