BOTTLING: Sarcastic Doorman

The great advantage of brewing a very small batch of beer is that it can only be a very small disaster.

I kid.  Somewhat.  Bottling is now finished, but it was a bit of a trial.  To begin with, the beer didn't attenuate quite as far as predicted - it's actually only 5.9% alcohol, I estimate, with a final gravity of about 1.028 or 1.029 - but that's fine.  It certainly tastes good.  Unfortunately, though, between the unavoidable losses, some spills resulting from my still far-from-perfect solo bottling technique, miscalculations, and so on, I've probably got less than three liters all together actually bottled.  This means both that I'm 25% short of my target batch size, and that I probably have too much headspace in my bottles which may affect carbonation.

Still, fingers crossed.  I'd like to crack at least one open in about ten days at the next Edmonton Homebrewer's Guild meeting (my first!), so hopefully it will be ready by then.

It's all worth it in the end, though:







(The label, based on that doodle in a previous post, was made in Inkscape, which is a very cool program I wish I could run the latest version of, and attached with tape, because the glue stick I bought turned out to be no good.)

Well, I've learned a lot of lessons for next time...

The Rack: Sarcastic Doorman

So I've finally gotten around to racking the Sarcastic Doorman tonight, after eleven days in the primary - a record for me, though nothing extraordinary really.  Lots of homebrewers leave things in the primary for a few weeks or more.

I appear, like my last batch, to have lost some volume - I'm down to an estimated three and a half liters, judging by how far it fills my little carboy.

I prefer to think of it as mostly full rather than a little bit empty.

If it were four liters exactly, it would be right up to the bottom of the neck, I think.  Which is where it should be - you don't want much headspace in the secondary fermenter.  I'll live with it this time, and I suppose in future I can beef up the batch size to account for possible losses?

As with my last batch, I'm not totally clear on where the missing volume went.  It obviously wasn't evaporation.  That dense, creamy krausen eventually turned espresso-brown and settled.  I certainly didn't leave that much liquid behind when I was racking (I favour disturbing my sediment a little over missing any of my beer).  I don't think I've been sleepwalking into the cupboard and drinking it with a straw.  I'm at a loss.

It smells excellent, anyway.  I didn't take a gravity reading or taste any, I'm trying to preserve as much of it for bottling as possible, but I have high hopes!

Alberta Bans Strong Beer

This is total crap.

It makes no sense.  As one of the comments on the article above says, banning strong beer to combat binge drinking is like banning swiss army knives to stop gang violence.  Highschoolers aren't buying richly complex imported Belgian Tripels or five-year-old oak-aged barleywine to get hammered on, they're buying cases of Lucky and cheap vodka.

The ban is actually only on beers over 11.9% ABV, and of course it's on the sale, so I can brew whatever I want (and I'm of a mind to put on a real monster as soon as the fermenter is free again, just because), but it's the principle of the thing.  A cheap bottle of wine in the same alcohol range can be had for about the same price as on of these beers, in the same store, and as far as price-per-milliliter of alcohol goes some hard liquors, again on the same shelves, beat both of them, but you're allowed to appreciate a fine scotch whiskey or a French wine.  Beer is still viewed as a cheap, lower-class drink for idiots to get hammered on.

It's always the thing I like...

What's This? (Sarcastic Doorman)

My krausen, rather than falling back into the brew as would traditionally be expected, instead seems to have condensed into a half-inch thick layer of super-dense mottled foam over the entire surface of the beer, and doesn't look inclined to go anywhere soon.  I have never seen or read about anything like this before.  Do I just try to rack through it?  I don't want to skim it off, because on such a small batch even foam constitutes a significant part of the volume...

Next time I do a small batch, I'll invest in an anti-foaming agent and sidestep this whole issue, I think.

UPDATE: Further reading indicates I've just chosen a yeast that's going to work a bit slowly given the low temperature in my brewing closet, despite the massive over-pitching.  I'm going to give it about a week to see if the krausen falls, and if not, I'll check the gravity and probably just rack out from under it; I'm sure it will be fully fermented by that time, anyway.

HIGH KRAUSEN: Sarcastic Doorman

"High Krausen" is not, contrary to popular belief, the time when yeasts
hold tiny shoot-outs in your beer.  That actually occurs only during lagering.

Unsurprisingly, given that I massively over-pitched my yeast (that is to say, 100 billion yeast cells is a bit excessive for four liters of wort), fermentation is proceeding pretty rapidly and the beer is krausening like crazy.  The krausen is the foam which develops on top of the fermenting wort early in primary fermentation.  This is caused, I believe, by the CO2 produced by the yeast when it is metabolizing sugars pushing certain compounds out of the wort, and in some places (notably Germany), this foam is skimmed either to harvest yeast or simply to remove the compounds in it so that they are not reabsorbed into the beer; the foam can contain some of the harsher compounds found in hops, and removing it is supposed to yield beer with a smoother bitterness.  Modern "noble" hops, of course, contain far less of those compounds than would have been found at the time this tradition was started, and in some styles they are desirable anyway, so skimming the krausen is not often recommended for the homebrewer.

For some kind of perspective, I've got as much krausen on these four liters as I get on the average 23 liter batch, but it seems much denser.  I'll probably be moving this brew to the secondary almost as soon as the krausen falls, no later than Wednesday I think.

BREW DAY: Sarcastic Doorman

Today was the day to brew my new experimental small-batch recipe, Sarcastic Doorman rye porter (see the post bellow this one for an early sketch of the label).  As I brew here in my one-room apartment upstairs from my landlord and it's damn cold here in the winter, a one-gallon batch is about as much as I can make without using a kit.

It was a lovely morning for it.