seand

Recipes 

I measured the gravity of the experiment today... it's on the recipe final on the dot. CO2 activity is essentially zero. The real fermenter has stopped as well.

I absolutely see the yeast suspension differentiation... it's highly transparent at the top and the transition line to cloudy is lowering with time. The suspension layer is still there though above that though. This particular brew had fresh orange peel and corriander and I wonder if some of those ingredients are forming oils in a top layer?

My wife today said we should do this for future brews... she's just as hooked.

RM-MN

Recipes 

While that is a nice way to see what is going on in the bucket you need to be aware that the two fermentations do not necessarily work at the same pace. Also what you don't see is the complex chemical reactions that are going on and will continue to go on for some time as the compounds that the yeast produced during the fast initial ferment are slowly broken down into compounds that we find more pleasing to the palate. Since these go on slowly and do not produce CO2 they are hard to see.

seand

Recipes 

While the CO2 output appeared about the same pace, there are definitely some big differences. I cracked open the real fermenter today to do a gravity measurement and it has a huge krausen layer with large foam bubbles on top... so I closed it back up untouched.

So I'm in the dark on what the gravity is. The experiment is basically finished and completely settled out. Between smaller volume, column height, temperature, light, who knows what variables drove that.

Teromous

Recipes 

Dry-hopping gives some interesting eye-candy as well. I just had one where pockets of CO2 would shoot up through the layer of fallen hop crud, and shoot it straight up into the wort. It was like watching the intro to Blade Runner with green glasses on.