I haven't brewed in about 15 years...we moved, had a couple of kids, etc, etc. To make a long story short, Santa brought me a Brewer's Best American Pale Ale kit for Christmas (how did he know Pale Ales are my wife's favorite winter beer) so I dug all of my old stuff out of the attic and spent the next few days cleaning the dust off of it.
On December 29th I did a full boil with R.O. water instead of my tap water. All went well with the process which was surprising considering I hadn't done it in 15 years. I had the beer chilled to 68 degrees in about 15 minutes and pitched the included 11gm pack of Nottingham directly into the carboy (without rehydrating) at 11pm and moved the carboy into a closet. By 11 am on the 30th I had a slight "head" on the wort and by 6pm it was in full Kraeusen mode. At 11 am this morning (January 2) all fermentation appears to have ceased and at 10 pm I had a 1.010 reading on my hygrometer and it tastes pretty damn good too!
Fermentation was completed in a closet with ambient temp of 60 degrees and since I have two kids who like to open the closet door and not close it the fermenter was covered with an old turtleneck sweater to keep the morning sunlight light out. I would assume the temps in the fermenter were a few degrees higher than the ambient air temp but 3 days seems like a pretty fast fermentation to me!
I plan on brewing BierMuncher's Centennial Blonde in the next day or two and since I only have one 6.5g primary and two 5g secondaries I figured I would try racking the Pale Ale to a secondary then racking the Centennial Blonde directly from the brew pot onto the yeast cake in my primary. I've read that Nottingham has had some issues lately but it didn't seem to affect this batch.
Does anyone have any advice against racking directly onto a Nottingham yeast cake?
On December 29th I did a full boil with R.O. water instead of my tap water. All went well with the process which was surprising considering I hadn't done it in 15 years. I had the beer chilled to 68 degrees in about 15 minutes and pitched the included 11gm pack of Nottingham directly into the carboy (without rehydrating) at 11pm and moved the carboy into a closet. By 11 am on the 30th I had a slight "head" on the wort and by 6pm it was in full Kraeusen mode. At 11 am this morning (January 2) all fermentation appears to have ceased and at 10 pm I had a 1.010 reading on my hygrometer and it tastes pretty damn good too!
Fermentation was completed in a closet with ambient temp of 60 degrees and since I have two kids who like to open the closet door and not close it the fermenter was covered with an old turtleneck sweater to keep the morning sunlight light out. I would assume the temps in the fermenter were a few degrees higher than the ambient air temp but 3 days seems like a pretty fast fermentation to me!
I plan on brewing BierMuncher's Centennial Blonde in the next day or two and since I only have one 6.5g primary and two 5g secondaries I figured I would try racking the Pale Ale to a secondary then racking the Centennial Blonde directly from the brew pot onto the yeast cake in my primary. I've read that Nottingham has had some issues lately but it didn't seem to affect this batch.
Does anyone have any advice against racking directly onto a Nottingham yeast cake?
