I broke pretty much every rule in the book...

Time fixes all beer, right? How long for that 1000 IBUs to tame down to a normal level?

The pound of hops is what makes this fishy. Unless the OP grows them at home that is a LOT of money.

Yeah, it seems like (without a hop bag) you'd lose most of the three gallons to hop trub.

Maybe shecky just wanted a clever thread to post his new starter vessels.

If this a true. Holy crap. I wish I could taste it when it's done. I seriously doubt you'll be able to drink this. and DO NOT pour it through cheese cloth into another vessel. After fermentation you don't want to splash the beer at all or it will oxidize and leave off flavors. Not a huge concern here because this Honey/Hop tea is probably not going to be the most appetizing. Good luck though.

Your beer is cloudy with suspended yeast who are very busy eating the sugar in the beer. It will settle with time though I am unsure if it will be clear.

What is wheat barley? Wheat and barley are two different types of grain.
Was you grain malted or just raw? If malted, then you may have mashed the grain and actually produced malt extract and may have something kind of like beer. If its raw then most likely you will have a very cloudy alcoholic beverage flavored like wheat and lemon. Its not a traditional wheat beer but may be related.

One problem is 500gm of hops. Thats enough hops for several 5 gal batches of beer or one huge IPA. Your beer will be off the scale in bitterness. This starts to sound like a hop tea. To give you an idea, for a 5gal hobgoblin clone it has 30gm boiled for 60min and another 30gm added at the 30min mark.

So leave these bottles sit like the are for a few weeks. At that time add a teaspoon of sugar to each one and seal. A couple weeks later chill and taste. I would not expect much.

In the mean time read How To Brew and start a real beer.

Craig

Ok just to clear it up - I've no idea who this laughing gnome guy is but it's not me - I'm Henry AKA onelegout - If you google 'onelegout' you will find my site (stencil graffiti site) and quite a few profiles on other websites.

re the hops, I just checked the packaging and it was actually only 100 grams of hops! Apologies for the misunderstanding! Will that make it taste better?

I've just checked on the bottles and they're fizzing and overflowing with froth from the fermentation! Does it matter if I lose this froth? presumably I would be siphoning the liquid below the froth after the fermentation was finished anyway?

H

100 grams of hops is much more reasonable... although still kind of a lot.

Losing the froth isn't a big deal. The worst that will happen is you'll lose some beer with it.

This will be interesting when it is time to bottle...(yes I know they are in bottles now but at some point you will have to add sugar in order to carb them).

You could get a food grade conatiner and gently pour the beer into that, cover witha lid and an airlock till fermentation is done.

While this experiment is running, you should seriously read the how to brew guide posted above.

If people keep reading "How To Brew", this forum, and all the other brew lit. out there, then how are supposed to get threads as entertaining as this one?

The froth you're experiencing is likely krausen from the primary fermentation. It will go away with time.

Someone else said it but I'm going to say it too: there's no such thing as "wheat barley" as they are two separate grains. Did you mean wheat malt?

AZ_IPA said:

Les Big Mac?

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Les Mac Big

My girlfriend was corrected by an overly irritated French cashier.:cross:

taylornate said:

Les Mac Big

My girlfriend was corrected by an overly irritated French cashier.:cross:

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Big Mac is a trademarked name, it would still be Les Big mac. Your girlfriend should have smacked the cashier.

bernerbits said:

The froth you're experiencing is likely krausen from the primary fermentation. It will go away with time.

Someone else said it but I'm going to say it too: there's no such thing as "wheat barley" as they are two separate grains. Did you mean wheat malt?

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Aaaah that makes much more sense! It WAS Wheat malt - I was pretty drunk when I ordered it...

onelegout said:

re the hops, I just checked the packaging and it was actually only 100 grams of hops! Apologies for the misunderstanding! Will that make it taste better?

I've just checked on the bottles and they're fizzing and overflowing with froth from the fermentation! Does it matter if I lose this froth? presumably I would be siphoning the liquid below the froth after the fermentation was finished anyway?

H

Click to expand...

100gm of hops is still a ton of hops for a 3 gal batch. You are still going to be off the charts, just not in the stratosphere.

What you are seeing is kraeusen. It is the yeast and proteins in the beer that float to the surface on the CO2 escaping from the beer. The production of alcohol from sugar produces CO2. Once it finishes fermenting then the foam will drop to the bottom of the beer. Normally this would happen in a fermenter and you would siphon the beer from above the trub (stuff that settles out of the beer) before bottling. If shouldn't matter is you lose a little froth it just makes a mess. It is possible to lose a considerable amount of beer is some cases however, i would not worry about that here given the quality of the beverage.

I am still curious about this wheat barley. Can you give us a better idea what it really is? wheat? Barley? Malted? something else entirely?

<edit> Oh wheat malt. You may have actually succeeded in making a wheat beer despite your best efforts.
Normally you would use 50/50 or 60/40 wheat malt and barley malt and skip the sugar. In addition if you read How To Brew on the all-grain section you will learn about the temperatures, times and processes usually used to extract the most malt sugars from the grains.

Craig

I am confused with this whole thread. Will you convert all the weights to stone? :cross:

Aaaah that makes much more sense! It WAS Wheat malt - I was pretty drunk when I ordered it...

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Hope you don't mind if I already co-opted this thread for my avatar title

Even if it was wheat malt, is 20 minutes enough time to get conversion?? or was it wheat malt extract? I'm confused.

this reminds me of an experience I had when I was 15
I took a liter bottle, filled it with orange juice, threw some baking yeast in there, and screwed the lid on...
it didn't blow up but it did make a hell of a mess when I opened it after a week
orange juice everywhere!
it tasted like total crap from what I remember I don't think I even drank all of it
and I once drank vodka and root beer lol! I'll drink anything
I think with the extra sugar this recipe could be extremely volatile
it may not explode if the bottles are plastic but there should definitely be someone video recording this when the bottles are opened
if the bottles are glass they will explode, no question about it!

IrregularPulse said:

Big Mac is a trademarked name, it would still be Les Big mac. Your girlfriend should have smacked the cashier.

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It doesn't mean they don't market it as Mac Big in France, but you're probably right. That was pretty much her reaction, minus the smacking.

I smell a TROLL!!

The beer is fizzing away quite happily now - seems to be a much lighter color already as a lot of it has settled - Is it a big problem that I only used wheat malt? I had thought I'd bought some kind of wheat/barley mixture as it was listed under the 'barley' section of the homebrew site I bought it from! I feel really dumb now haha!

I'm not *too* worried about the length of time the wheat malt was mashed for as I added quite a bit of sugar and honey and the yeast is definately munching away at all the sugars as you can physically hear it fizzing and the air bubbling out of the top of the partially closed bottle tops!

onelegout said:

On another note - Hops smell remarkably like marijuana.

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That's because they are related plants. You can actually smoke hops with (somewhat) similar effects.

onelegout said:

Cool so I should be able to just store them in the bottles like they are for fermentation and then re-bottle them; that sounds much more optimistic!

I wasn't lying about the color!

Oh and by the way, I'm not an imposter - I actually am a new user, my name is Henry and I come from Chichester on the south coast of England.

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Henry,
Do the bottles even have rubber gaskets? From your pic it looks like they don't have gaskets (at least the one in the middle), unless they are clear. If not, I don't think you have to worry about bottle bombs from this hop-monster you have created, just a big mess!
Cheers,
Brian

I does look like there aren't any gaskets. Also, I'd bet its the honey and sugar fermenting and not the very lightly mashed wheat.

I really can't wait until one of these gets cracked open in a month or two. Be sure to keep us updated with pictures along the way, and good luck!

llazy_llama said:

No, I don't think you unintentionally made a wheat beer. I think you basically skipped the drinking/processing phase of beer and went straight to the final product - urine.

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busting a gut over here!!

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ54kh-nClk&feature=related]YouTube - Lessons in Carbonation[/ame]

If this is real, I can't wait until they are ready to drink lol

"Mad dogs and Englishmen"! Very fitting.
With nearly a pound of hops if the explosions don't take your head off the bitter taste surely will.

I think you made a IIIIPWA (Imposably Imperial Idia Incredibly Pale Wheat Ale). I still can get over how much hops that is. Not to mention how little malt.

So just for fun I took the liberty of throwing this into beer smith:

Volume: 6L

500.00 gm Wheat Malt, Bel
100.00 gm Fuggles [4.50 %] (45 min)
200.00 gm Sugar, Table
100.00 gm Honey

Beer Profile:
Estimated Original Gravity: 1.025 SG
Estimated Final Gravity: 1.007 SG
Estimated Color: 2.2 SRM
Bitterness: 201.0 IBU
Estimated Alcohol by Volume: 2.42 %

I put 30% for the brew house efficiency

It should taste very interesting.

I'm surprised at how close you got to actually doing a mash, I had no idea that mashing was necessary for beer when I started. Keep us all posted.

By the way, best thread ever.

Thanks for the math Rhymenoceros! If nothing else it will be fun to see how it turns out!
Is there any way that you can tell whether the mash worked or not? I understood that I was trying to get the sugar out but had no idea how long I needed to heat it for - It tasted like a very sweet porridge so I figured if it tasted sweet it would be ok?

Edit: yep all but one bottle has got a rubber gasket - I'm not THAT dumb lol!

Ok I just went and weighed the small amount of hops that I decided not to put in the brew (Incase something went severely wrong and I had to start from scratch) and they weighed 18 grams so the amount of fuggles that went into this brew would have been 82 grams - does that make it any closer to drinkable?

I've checked the bottles and they look a MUCH nicer colour - exactly the same as Hoegarden. The frothing's stopped (it pushed the semi-secure bottle tops off overnight!) and the beer seems to have settled down. How long should I leave it before re-bottling? 5 days? Can I use regular caster sugar for priming the bottles? How long must it stay in the bottles before opening? I'm pretty sure the bottles aren't pressure tested so is it best that I don't prime them?
H

If the bottles aren't designed to hold pressure there's a good chance they will explode if you try to carbonate in them. Of course if you don't prime/carbonate the beer will be flat... but I have a feeling that will be the least of the beer's problem.

Regardless, I'd wait a week then transfer into other containers. Of course taste it at that point and give us a report.

OK I just cleaned off the froth from the lid of the bottles which had turned into a brown paste when it dried in the air! After moving the bottles they got agitated and they're now bubbling like a pint of lager - is this normal for primary fermentation? I was under the impression that only a little gas was released? I've taken the gaskets off all the bottles and secured the tops so that a little air can be released but no flies or other nasties can jump in for a swim.

Wow. Just wow.

I'm sure gnome knows that someone here can view the IP address of each poster and guess whether he is faking this thread or not. I am wondering why he hasn't chimed in on this yet!

Pratchett's characters sometimes say:

"Pull the other one, it's got bells on!"

Huge amounts of CO2 are released during fermentation. Usually primary fermentation takes at least a few days and gas will be released throughout the process.

Homercidal said:

Pratchett's characters sometimes say:

"Pull the other one, it's got bells on!"

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Speaking of Pratchett, this certainly sounds like an Alchemist's Guild sort of experiment. I just hope the house in insured if you do plan to carb in these bottles.

This video was fun to watch. Although leaving beer in bottles for more than a year is not the cause of this. I opened a 2 year old homebrew last week and it certainly didn't gush, gushers are a whole different topic.

woollybugger2 said:

YouTube - Lessons in Carbonation

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