wingedcoyote
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- Joined
- Sep 19, 2013
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Good news is, my first batch (Centennial APA) is finally all the way to prime drinkin' time and it's quite tasty, if a little more bitter than I bargained for. Hoorah! And my third batch, a mini holiday spiced amber, is still in primary but put on an impressive show of bubbling away for the first week.
Second beer, more problems. It's an extract-based English brown ale fermented with Mangrove Jack's Newcastle strain, OG 1.048. This one bubbled quite hard for a short period and then got real quiet, but I let it ride without interference and figured the job would get done. Testing a couple weeks in, 1.020. Three weeks and change, 1.020. Now, it's pretty chilly in the house at this point so I figure the yeast got sleepy, so I roused it up pretty good and strapped a heating pad to the bucket and put a sweater over it, cycling to keep the fermometer showing 70ish. Another week later... yep, still 1.020. My target was 1.013 btw.
Give up and bottle it? 3.7% ABV seems pretty puny and I assume it will be too sweet, but I guess it's better than dumping it. I'm tempted to wait until batch 3 is done and then scrape its (US-05) yeast cake into the brown ale, but I don't know what the results would be from introducing different yeast at this point and it would also probably have some spice and American hop residue in it.
Thoughts? BTW the current hydro sample from the brown tastes OK but pretty weird, rather wine-like with a lot of fruit and some booziness.
Second beer, more problems. It's an extract-based English brown ale fermented with Mangrove Jack's Newcastle strain, OG 1.048. This one bubbled quite hard for a short period and then got real quiet, but I let it ride without interference and figured the job would get done. Testing a couple weeks in, 1.020. Three weeks and change, 1.020. Now, it's pretty chilly in the house at this point so I figure the yeast got sleepy, so I roused it up pretty good and strapped a heating pad to the bucket and put a sweater over it, cycling to keep the fermometer showing 70ish. Another week later... yep, still 1.020. My target was 1.013 btw.
Give up and bottle it? 3.7% ABV seems pretty puny and I assume it will be too sweet, but I guess it's better than dumping it. I'm tempted to wait until batch 3 is done and then scrape its (US-05) yeast cake into the brown ale, but I don't know what the results would be from introducing different yeast at this point and it would also probably have some spice and American hop residue in it.
Thoughts? BTW the current hydro sample from the brown tastes OK but pretty weird, rather wine-like with a lot of fruit and some booziness.
And I hardly coddled these guys -- among other things, the ambient temp that had been hovering around 70 crashed suddenly to 60 more or less in the middle of active fermentation, so it's maybe not too surprising if they didn't live up to their full potential.
