Hi all,
so, I tasted my beer coming from my first brew tonight. But before that, let's just do a little recapitulation of my adventure in the homebrew world.
It all began in August 2009 when I had the idea "Heck, I just love beers, I could brew some myself, I heard it's not that hard". I went to the LHBS, the guy told me "Hey, I'm closing right now (6 pm) and I'm going off for 2 weeks... I'm really sorry, I'm in the business for 15 years, and never really took holidays... but hey, take this book (Papazian's Complete Joy), read it, and when I'm back, we will talk some more." I read it, subscribed on these boards, read it A LOT, and then I learned that the greatest good I can do to my beer is... well, maintaining proper temperature during fermentation. I searched about it for convenient way to do this and then I posted here : https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/temperature-129115/
I settled on a Mother of a Fermentation Chiller in order to maintain proper temperature during fermentation : https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/my-mother-fermentation-chiller-142442/ Unfortunately, the first design of my MoFC failed miserably, and I had to do some modifications on it (in the same thread). People in it gave suggestions which I followed. I was infuriated, but hey, life's good I guess, better take it as it comes. With only some small modifications, the thing was perfect in doing his job and, now, it can hold the temperature for about 48 hours without changing the ice. I'm curious about what will happen in the hot months of summer, but I'll see then. My apartment is about 80 F during winter (there's a lot of old folks in the building complaining about the cold weather... so we have to deal with it).
So, it brings us to january. Why a timespan of about 5-6 months? 1) The building of the MoFC 2) The University 3) Combining my schedule with my friend's to find the time to actually build it. I'm not a handyman at all, I'm a theoretical physicist, so I needed my friend to build it (to learn from him about how to actually build things... I build it myself, done the big parts of the job, but I needed his experience and knowledge).
Then, I finally brewed after 6 months of hard waiting. I chose the None More Black Vanilla Stout in the recipe sections of HBT. BUT, after all those months spent trying to foresee everything (which made me think everything would go fine), well, everything went wrong : https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/first-day-brewing-disaster-156317/ I followed the advices there: I relaxed, I didn't worried, I maintained the proper temperature range all the time, and I let the yeast do its job. It spent two weeks in primary, and two weeks in secondary. I had an attenuation problem though. The FG was 1.020, while it was supposed to be more around 1.014. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/after-2-weeks-primary-159025/
I realized yet another thing with the brewing process : hop utilization depend on the boil volume. But, when I boiled, I boiled less water in order to achieve a strong boil, as I'm on an electric stovetop. So I got less hop utilization (about 15 IBUs instead of 20 IBUs the recipe was calling for) than expected. I didn't post a thread on it because, well, I can't come back on this. I was really anxious with that. Less hop utilization + less attenuation than required = too sweet beer.
I bottled three weeks from now. 21 days ago, I was bottling. So, I thought it was time to reward myself with one good homebrew -- my first one. Yeah, I went through 21 days of waiting (I even had to drink a Rochefort 10 in order to refrain myself from drinking one before time).
So, here's me holding the beer :
And the beer in the glass :
(My stouts glass are all in my mother's house, I don't know why, so I took my lucky glass)
Here's me smelling the aromas of the beer :
And me tasting it and telling my appreciation :
_____________________________________________________________
The beer is fine. Smell good, taste good. The vanilla is barely noticeable, next time I'll try to add some more (I know that some brands of pure vanilla extract are weeker/stronger than others). I drank it all with no problems. Not INCREDIBLE, but good and enjoyable.
The beer was a little bit flat. Beneath the head, the beer was carbonated, but not very much. There were some kind of watery mouthfeel to it, which my gf characterized as "It's good, but the taste is not very powerful." She had just drank a Chimay Blanche before it...
I know of three possibilities :
1) This is a stout, and I read here (Revvy's blog) that it can take up to 5-6 weeks before the beer is fully carbonated
2) Non-uniform priming solution dilution in the bottling bucket.
3) Not enough sugar.
All in all, I'll wait with this brew, hoping that in a few more weeks, the watery mouthfeel decrease.
Next recipe : probably Papazian's Who's in the Garden Grand Cru ale.
so, I tasted my beer coming from my first brew tonight. But before that, let's just do a little recapitulation of my adventure in the homebrew world.
It all began in August 2009 when I had the idea "Heck, I just love beers, I could brew some myself, I heard it's not that hard". I went to the LHBS, the guy told me "Hey, I'm closing right now (6 pm) and I'm going off for 2 weeks... I'm really sorry, I'm in the business for 15 years, and never really took holidays... but hey, take this book (Papazian's Complete Joy), read it, and when I'm back, we will talk some more." I read it, subscribed on these boards, read it A LOT, and then I learned that the greatest good I can do to my beer is... well, maintaining proper temperature during fermentation. I searched about it for convenient way to do this and then I posted here : https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/temperature-129115/
I settled on a Mother of a Fermentation Chiller in order to maintain proper temperature during fermentation : https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/my-mother-fermentation-chiller-142442/ Unfortunately, the first design of my MoFC failed miserably, and I had to do some modifications on it (in the same thread). People in it gave suggestions which I followed. I was infuriated, but hey, life's good I guess, better take it as it comes. With only some small modifications, the thing was perfect in doing his job and, now, it can hold the temperature for about 48 hours without changing the ice. I'm curious about what will happen in the hot months of summer, but I'll see then. My apartment is about 80 F during winter (there's a lot of old folks in the building complaining about the cold weather... so we have to deal with it).
So, it brings us to january. Why a timespan of about 5-6 months? 1) The building of the MoFC 2) The University 3) Combining my schedule with my friend's to find the time to actually build it. I'm not a handyman at all, I'm a theoretical physicist, so I needed my friend to build it (to learn from him about how to actually build things... I build it myself, done the big parts of the job, but I needed his experience and knowledge).
Then, I finally brewed after 6 months of hard waiting. I chose the None More Black Vanilla Stout in the recipe sections of HBT. BUT, after all those months spent trying to foresee everything (which made me think everything would go fine), well, everything went wrong : https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/first-day-brewing-disaster-156317/ I followed the advices there: I relaxed, I didn't worried, I maintained the proper temperature range all the time, and I let the yeast do its job. It spent two weeks in primary, and two weeks in secondary. I had an attenuation problem though. The FG was 1.020, while it was supposed to be more around 1.014. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/after-2-weeks-primary-159025/
I realized yet another thing with the brewing process : hop utilization depend on the boil volume. But, when I boiled, I boiled less water in order to achieve a strong boil, as I'm on an electric stovetop. So I got less hop utilization (about 15 IBUs instead of 20 IBUs the recipe was calling for) than expected. I didn't post a thread on it because, well, I can't come back on this. I was really anxious with that. Less hop utilization + less attenuation than required = too sweet beer.
I bottled three weeks from now. 21 days ago, I was bottling. So, I thought it was time to reward myself with one good homebrew -- my first one. Yeah, I went through 21 days of waiting (I even had to drink a Rochefort 10 in order to refrain myself from drinking one before time).
So, here's me holding the beer :
And the beer in the glass :
(My stouts glass are all in my mother's house, I don't know why, so I took my lucky glass)
Here's me smelling the aromas of the beer :
And me tasting it and telling my appreciation :
_____________________________________________________________
The beer is fine. Smell good, taste good. The vanilla is barely noticeable, next time I'll try to add some more (I know that some brands of pure vanilla extract are weeker/stronger than others). I drank it all with no problems. Not INCREDIBLE, but good and enjoyable.
The beer was a little bit flat. Beneath the head, the beer was carbonated, but not very much. There were some kind of watery mouthfeel to it, which my gf characterized as "It's good, but the taste is not very powerful." She had just drank a Chimay Blanche before it...
I know of three possibilities :
1) This is a stout, and I read here (Revvy's blog) that it can take up to 5-6 weeks before the beer is fully carbonated
2) Non-uniform priming solution dilution in the bottling bucket.
3) Not enough sugar.
All in all, I'll wait with this brew, hoping that in a few more weeks, the watery mouthfeel decrease.
Next recipe : probably Papazian's Who's in the Garden Grand Cru ale.
. I ended up bottling half of the batch in 40's due to me wanting to save bottles and knowing that I wouldn't drink just one of them. Turned out fine though. After this, I started using two burners on stove top and my boil off rate is .8 gallons per hour. Got it down now.
