With all tools and supplies in place I decided to do my first cook.
The boil was in the open garage at a raw 30* with snow flurries. I was exposed to that from 11am until 5:30pm, at which time I stayed out there with a beer and cigar (another hour).
I was pretty used up.
The boil came off ok. I normally plan everything well, but had trouble getting ahead of things. Stuff never seemed to be where I needed it.
The post boil SG was 1.052 which I feel is good. The actual boil went for 70 minutes. I was late adding yeast nutrients that required 10 minutes of boil.
Tasting it at this point was a surprise…it tasted like beer. Had a strong lingering flavor. Didn’t seem to be a girly drink. It did appear dark brown in the fermenter bucket.
Chiller dropped the temp to 78* and the wort was moved to a temp controlled room of 70*. 45 seconds of oxygen through a defuser stone caused a serious head.
The yeast starter had the top liquid (had nice settlement) poured off. The remaining pint, out of 3 pints, was pitched.
Was an awkward day where nothing was routine. I’m glad I had two trials with water first.
I have a question on PBW cleaner. The instruction calls for 1 to 2 oz per gallon of water, Is that fluid oz or oz wt. I measured 2 Tbs = 1 oz wt.
That worked great, but my hands are hurting. Gloves next time.
I need to work on streamlining, reducing wasted movements. Better prepping. And warmer weather.
Two Tbs PBW should be enough for 5 gallons. Do a search here or Google. The consensus is that 2oz/gallon is overkill.
Sounds like you have your system down but its always confusing at first. Gets easier after you do a few batches. I always try to line anything up on a table I can with notes on when it goes in. I label plastic cups with the time and put in the hop additions for example. A kitchen timer is also helpful or set your phone.
I don’t know what beer you are brewing but usually you will want the wort to be lower than 78° More like mid 60s for ales. I see some of the kits say cool to 78°. Not sure why.
I never knew why many instructions use ounces without declaring fluid or weight.
Following your advice with google, I found 1 Tbs/gal for light work and 2 Tbs/gal for heavy stuff.
I chilled the wort down to 78*. Yet to be done was draining to a plastic fermenter bucket in 30* weather. Then a walk around the house to the basement door. Oxygen injection and then a yeast pitch after a fair amount of wheel spinning looking for crap that should have been right there.
So the pitched to temp was less than 78*.
I shall improve.
You are doing great. No worries
Sounds like a successful brew day! You’ll dial in your process over time and it will be like making coffee before you know it. I use BeerSmith 3 as a recipe builder, brew log and brew day organization and timer. It’s very helpful to me since I hate writing things down and keeping up with a notebook or journal. It’s invaluable to me to have notes from the brew day to reference back to if there’s a problem or I just love the beer and want to replicate it precisely. Was also great at keeping me on track and organized the first few brew days. There are other ways but this one works for me.
Do look into temperature control measures for your fermentation space. 70 will be at the upper limit for most ales and you should get decent beer but getting it to low to mid 60s will give you a much cleaner finished product. Some people like the esters you get a warmer temps but it can depend on style as well. Something as simple as a swamp cooler or fan could help to get the temp down to where you want it.
PBW is caustic cleaning agent like lye and very hard on your skin. I try to keep my hands out of it as much as possible or rinse ASAP. I use about a tbs/5 gals for most cleaning jobs. I don’t use PBW on brew day because I’m generally starting with clean equipment. So just curious about your use of it on brew day… Remember it’s a CLEANER and NOT a sanitizer. It is toxic to consume so you need to rinse well with HOT water. Also, you still need to use something like star san prior to moving the wort to fermenters, for example. You may know all this but just making sure.
Last comment…the beer will look darker prior to fermentation and will always look darker in a bulk vessel. It will appear considerably lighter in most cases in the glass.
Good for you! we’ll be awaiting yer tasting notes…
Now for the next one… any ideas what you’ll brew?
Sneezles61
Thanks for the feed back.
I just lower the fermenting room temp a couple degrees. The room with no heat is 50*, so I can adjust to whatever is needed. I noticed the fermentation bucket temp strip tape is reading 72* with the room set at 70*. The bucket feels slightly warm which I guess is expected.
I chose these temps per the yeast temp range stated in the instruction.
I’ll try for the high 60*s.
I’m stoked.
Man, you’re lucky. Wish I had a temp controlled space that would get down to 50! Easy lagers and no shlepping frozen bottles to the swamp cooler twice a day!
When I had a house in central FL for a while it had a little concrete room in the back of the garage that I believe was a bomb shelter based on the age of the home but the previous owner used it as a home gym and had a hole cut in the exterior wall with a window AC in it. I could get it down to 60 and loved fermenting ales in there. At ambient 60 the buckets were usually around 62-63 by the fermometer strips. My preference is lower end of the yeasts’ temperature range.
Can lagers be fomented at 60*? I would like to try them, but thought I would need refrigeration.
In the summer, my basement gets up to 55* to 60*.
Lagers need to be fermented at art 50°. Congratulations on your first brew. Couple things you don’t need yeast nutrients for beer and if you use them you don’t need to boil them. Your wort should not taste like beer it should be sweet
Keep in mind lagers are fairly new to the beer game. Lager yeast is accidental infection brought from the “New World”. So when people talk about lager strains they have self selected to certain temperatures. The original strain from South America most likely didn’t give a damn.
There are lager yeasts that work in that temp range and you could definitely crank out a series of them in the cooler months. That’s what a lot of brewers do that rely on a cellar or caves as they did in the past. Brew them in the winter, enjoy them all summer and fall.
Oslo yeast is pretty amazing in it’s temperature range.
Would have been more interesting to me if he’d done 5 gals with the oslo and 5 with a lager yeast. All he really proved is oslo ferments cleaner at cooler temps. Then he said neither was very “lager like” so I guess I miss the point. There are plenty of ale yeasts one could use for a “mock” lager. This one doesn’t sound any better than those to me.
True. Except this is a bottom fermenter that ferments cleanly at 99F. There aren’t that many ale yeasts that can do that and Oslo is indeed cleaner at high temps than the other Kveik yeasts IMO.
