Separating the Good From the Bad

File Under: My favorite kind of beer is the kind with alcohol in it.

Today is exactly one month since we brewed our first all-grain beer - the Belgian Red Ale.  Since then, the sweet wort we produced has gone through a number of significant changes.  First it was dosed with 500ml of Belgian Ale yeast starter.  Then it fermented for ten days.  After that, it sat in secondary fermentation vessels for 2 weeks, conditioning and refining itself.  Finally, last Thursday night we added primer and put the stuff in bottles where it will sit for another two weeks (or longer) before we can finally have a sip.

Tasting a non-carbonated beer is sort of like eating cake batter.  You can get the essence of what it MIGHT be like when it's done, but really it is nothing like eating a cake.  Still, every time Doug and I bottle our beer we put aside a small portion in a pint glass, stare at it for a few minutes, smell it and then taste it, and though it is hard to make the jump from the taste of the non-carbonated version to the finished product there are some very important things we can ascertain from drinking the flat beer.

Bottles, covered with sanitizing residue

First, and most importantly, we can tell right away whether our new beer made it through fermentation without getting infected with the many wild yeasts, bacterias and molds that have been know to ruin a brand new brew.  In the past eighteen months we have dumped nearly forty gallons of new beer due to infection.  Infection comes from some sort of oversight in our sanitation process as we go through the steps of making the beer.  It's a total bummer, mostly because it can be avoided.  Good sanitation practices are the cornerstones for good beer, and probably require their own post to fully explain.  The good news on Thursday was that our beer was not infected.

Second, we can get a good idea about what the hop character is going to be like from A.) the bitterness of the brew, B.) the hops flavor that comes through and C.) the aroma of the brew.  Since this is our second Belgian Red Ale (we made an extract version in the spring) we were interested in making some subtle adjustments to the hops profile.  Belgian Ale yeast will almost certainly give the brew fruity notes - though this particular strain is less fruity then other Belgian's - but it's fruitiness, coupled with our use of the relatively new Citra hop, made the original Belgian Red slightly out of balance.  As it was, it was already a sweet, malty brew, so we dialed up the bitterness and backed off the flavoring hops to hopefully balance out the fruitiness with more bitterness.  Luckily, I think we came close to the mark.

The last thing we can ascertain from the flat brew is whether we achieved our intended color.  There's no use calling it a Belgian Red Ale if it comes out brown.  Seriously, I know this sounds elementary, but we made four amber ales that ended up brown and another black ale that was brown.  Something went seriously wrong with those those beers.  This beer, however, resembled mahogany wood stain and was nearly opaque - sort of like a red stout.  After two more weeks in the bottles, as it continues to condition, it should clear to translucent, but the color itself was spot on!

Bottling beer is by far our least favorite part of the process.  For one thing, it is extremely time consuming.  It is also another opportunity to infect the beer with the many floating bad guys that would love to live in our beer.  But mostly, there is no creative aspect to it.  It's grunt work.  Fill a bottle.  Cap a bottle.  Fill a bottle.  Cap a bottle.  Before we can even get started, however, we need to sanitize all the bottles by filling them with solution and then emptying them out.  Gallons of water are wasted.  The sanitizing solution turns our skin cells to soap.  My kitchen floor gets all wet.

Doug with a growler of the good stuff.

Ten gallons of beer will fill about five cases of twelve ounce bottles.  To help things along a bit we used an assortment of sixty-four ounce growlers, three liter swing tops and green seven-hundred-fifty milliliters bottles.  We only bottled a twelve pack of twelve ounce longnecks.  It really speeds up the process, but at the same time makes it so we need to commit to a least a couple beers every time we pop open a bottle.  I think we can live with that.

Once we had all the beer bottled we cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom and then set about the task of moving our recently brewed wheat beer from primary fermentation to secondary fermentation, or racking.

The main reason for racking the beer is to get it off the yeast before the yeast begins to die and releases byproducts into the beer that would certainly cause off flavors.  It also allows for suspended materials, sulfuric odors and flavors and tannin bitterness to settle out of the beer.

Future Star: Our Wheat Beer

This time we were SURE we had enough beer to fill those carboys to the tippy top without having to suck up any gross sludge off the bottom of the fermenter.  Except, once again, we messed up...

The problem this time was displacement.  Put anything with mass into a volume of water and that volume of water will rise.  Pretty simple.  I think I learned that when I was a child.  It's funny, though, how, under certain pressures, one can forget such a simple thing.

Our wheat beer is brewed with a dozen or so pears.  Pears have mass.  When there is no screen or filtering system in place between the brew pot and the fermenter there is a good chance that 12 pears will pour out into the fermerter, displace the liquid and make four and one half gallons look an awful lot like five gallons.  Once again, we didn't have enough beer.  Noted.

On the positive side, the final gravity of our wheat beer was around 1.012 from an original gravity of 1.048.  That yields an alcohol by volume percentage of 4.7%, which is exactly what we were aiming for.  To read more about gravity and what it all means, click here:

Thanks for reading.

Next Brew: The Botz Stout #2 - A higher alcohol stout to keep us warm this winter. 10/23/10

In Primary Fermentation: Nothing

In Secondary Fermentation: Wheat Beer

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