What I did for beer today

[Skeeter686]

My replacement chest freezer arrived, so I removed the collar from the old one, scraped off the silicone that I'd used for securing it to the old freezer, and attached the collar to the replacement. While the silicone was curing, I cleaned all the faucets, shanks, fittings, beer lines, etc.

Looking forward to pouring cold beer again!

 

[seatazzz]

Brewing up a blonde today, and got to thinking; might need a special celebration beer around end of October because baseball. What better beer to try to clone than Scuttlebutt's Big Dumper? They list what they use on their website, will be doable. If I do it next Sunday, will have some lagering time before the Big Week. Not going to jinx it by saying more!!

 

[day_trippr]

After 11 and 12 days respectively the two hazy batches I've been running are ready for a 48 hour 50°F soft-crash prior to dry hopping. I put all four carboys on low top pressure (~0.4 psi) CO2 providing by a pair of in-line BBQ regulators (hiding behind the bottle holder) to obviate any chance of pulling in O2, and set the controllers to do their thing...

Cheers!

 

[ScrewyBrewer]

Today I am cold-crashing a Pilsen/Citra SmAsH for a club project. Being the laziest person I know, this is one of my favorite parts of homebrewing. Just connect the CO2 to the fermentor, sit back, and watch as the temperature falls.

 

[CJ-3]

Yesterday I kegged the Kentucky Common I brewed on August 31.

 

[BrewZer]

Stirred up a recipe for my next batch: Super SMaSH Sa-Bros APA using 10 lbs of 2-row and an ounce of Sabro judiciously applied during the boiling process. Fermented out with US-05 around 68F, should bring me about 5 gallons of very pale, 5% ABV, citrusy/coconutty goodness.

 

[leedspointbrew]

Bottled (45) buckwheat honey porter. As expected and warned, very little honey flavor in the gravity reading sample that I tasted, but otherwise a solid porter, better than last iteration.
Inspired by some of MaxStout's recent posts, cleaned everything 3x instead of 2.

 

[Pennine]

Put all the equipment away, cleaned 2 kegs and took hydrometer samples of the Herfstbok and best bitter. I am happy with both yeasts, the Tim Taylor's dropped it down from 1.049 to 1.012 in a week and the Andechs from 1.068 to 1.014. low sulfur from the Andechs and no hint of sewers from Tim's.

 

[HM-2]

Dry hopped my hazy DIPA. 250g of pellets split 2:1 between Cryo and T90. 60% Simcoe, 40% Mosaic.

 

[Zadkiel]

Super SMaSH Sa-Bros

Love it. Genius.

 

[BrewZer]

Love it. Genius.

 

[Zadkiel]

View attachment 885273

My Quad currently cold conditioning:

 

[seatazzz]

Yesterday kegged off what was supposed to be a NEIPA fermented on Imperial Kveiking slurry; but due to an unfortunate event (i.e. I didn't label the yeast slurry growler) it fermented at 85 effing degrees on Nottingham slurry. Decided to let it ride since I didn't discover the error until after I pitched. Nothing but late hops and dry hops in this one, namely some slightly elderly El Dorado and relatively new Sabro, on a basic two-row malt base, came out about 6% and who knows what IBU because I don't care. Tapped it this afternoon since it's in a keg with a carb lid. And damn, maybe it's the hops covering any errors, but this one is TASTY. Lots of tropical flavors with that tiny hint of coconut on the back end that Sabro can throw.

 

[HM-2]

Yesterday kegged off what was supposed to be a NEIPA fermented on Imperial Kveiking slurry; but due to an unfortunate event (i.e. I didn't label the yeast slurry growler) it fermented at 85 effing degrees on Nottingham slurry.

IMO, a hazy fermented on Notty will (almost) always trump one fermented with Kveik.
Luckily Notty is pretty temperature resilient, I've fermented with it over 25°C several times with no ill effects.

 

[seatazzz]

IMO, a hazy fermented on Notty will (almost) always trump one fermented with Kveik.
Luckily Notty is pretty temperature resilient, I've fermented with it over 25°C several times with no ill effects.

Well crud. Now I'm upset with myself for trashing the slurry that was left. Googles wasn't much help after I discovered what I did, so I dumped it. Oh well, there's always next time....if I remember.

 

[Hoochin'Fool]

Brewed 3 gallons of 1052 pale ale wort. Bittered w/ Magnum for 30 ibus, cooled down to 175F and added a whole ounce of Superdelic hops, left on counter to slow-chill, while covered. Temp is down to 110 now, ninety minutes later. So far, the Superdelic seems pretty underwhelming. Getting a little flavor (juicy-fruit gum?) but not much else flavor or aroma wise.

 

[BeerNsteadofH2O]

Finished basic construction on my new bottling/washing/sanitizing station (repurposed from other project's) gave it a test sanitizing and bottling 49 bottles of Irish red... now that I've got the lift harness adjusted ( the base floats on rails_, ill replace the para cord with jack chain, the tabletop (made from go board) needs to be sealed ( go board is manufactured with fiberglass coating, and I reeeeealy dont want it in my beer) with bar top epoxy, as will anything that can get wet,.. I need to give all the wood a coat of epoxy paint ( again left over from boat project) then install the switches for the wash pumps.. having the winch sure beats lifting a bucket of beer with a ratcheting rope pulley .

 

[day_trippr]

It's "Dry Hop Day" here, with two ten gallon batches needing attention. One got 6 ounces of Azacca, Idaho7, and Strata, the other 6 ounces of the Holy Trinity - Citra, Mosaic and Simcoe. After measuring out the two doses I unassembled the pellets using my Cuisinart with the steel blade, then dumped the powder in the fermentors. The piles will slowly rain fragments over the rest of the day at least, saving me from disturbing the pancaked yeast by rousing...

Cheers!

 

[seatazzz]

This might be a TL;DR but bear with me here.

Not so much what I DID for beer today, but what I'm planning to do. Many here know that I've been using water from my water heater for strike water (yes, GASP, OMG how could you do that). I've made some great beers that way, but also some absolute dumpers. In my never ending quest to improve my process, a few brews back started exclusively using cold water from the house which requires a lot of moving stuff around, or several trips with a 1g pitcher to fill the BK. All of them have been very good. We do not have cold water access in the garage, where the brewery is. A couple of years ago we had our amazing plumbers out to get us set up so our house fridge could make ice; they did this by installing a T where the cold water comes into the water heater, and running pex from that along the wall, then through the wall, to the house fridge. Our wonderful handyman neighbor came over last brewday, and said we could install a T in the pex then a valve so to have access to cold water in the garage. Me being me (and my wonderful husband not being very home-improvement inclined except for IKEA furniture) I decided I could do this myself. Bought the hardware today, have everything ready to go including dremel to cut the pex where I'm going to install the T; also found the sometimes unfindable tool to turn off the water at the main in front of the house.

So, why isn't this done yet? Good question. Overthinking, for one thing. Worried it will leak although I'm using sharkbite fittings, and bought extra pex in case it's needed. Mostly just chicken. Kinda like when I bought an angle grinder two years ago that I still am not brave enough to use. Have buckets ready to catch any overflow, and Home Depot about 5 minutes down the road if I have to get more hardware. Wish me luck.

 

[seatazzz]

SUCCESS!! I did need my amazing handyman neighbor's help to turn the water back on while I checked for leaks, but none. Attached the potable water hose to see how fast it runs, got 4g in the BK in jig time. YAY no more water heater water!!!

 

[Hoochin'Fool]

... I unassembled the pellets using my Cuisinart with the steel blade, then dumped the powder in the fermentors.

Do you get much hop matter floating around in the finished beer? I feel like I would get better dry-hop utilization if I tossed my hops in loose, but I always end up with a bunch of hop flakes floating in my bottles if I don't put them in a bag (whether I bottle from the fermenter, or transfer to bottling bucket). I know you keg, but maybe someone else does this hop-grind and bottles, and has a comment...

 

[day_trippr]

Literally zero hop fragments ever end up in a keg here. First, I do a hard crash to 36°F for 2 days, which slams everything out of suspension to the bottom. Then I do a CO2-pushed closed transfer to the kegs, using a dip tube in the carboy with 400 mesh paint strainer bag material encircling the tip (all sanitized and CO2 purged, of course).

Dip tube:

Racking rig:

If your fermentor can support a pressure transfer it might allow for using the same type of paint strainer material somewhere in the process of bottling...

Cheers!

 

[Hoochin'Fool]

Literally zero hop fragments ever end up in a keg here. First, I do a hard crash to 36°F for 2 days, which slams everything out of suspension to the bottom. Then I do a CO2-pushed closed transfer to the kegs, using a dip tube in the carboy with 400 mesh paint strainer bag material encircling the tip (all sanitized and CO2 purged, of course).

I wonder if blitzing the hops in a blender makes them more or less likely to settle to the bottom, but my hunch is "more likely to sink to the bottom". I don't have any way to do a real cold crash until winter returns, and even then, I don't have any way to avoid atmospheric suckback (I know what would be required to avoid that). Still, I think I'm gonna give this (blenderized dry-hops technique) a try on my Superdelic pale ale in a couple days (it was brewed this morning).

 

[day_trippr]

So this is the end of a totally empirical process: for years I would dump whole pellets into fermentation-temperature beer (ie: in the upper 60s°F) and aside from the most dense pellets, the rest would turn into a big floating mass of mush and take days to sink, if ever, before I cold-crashed them all to the bottom prior to racking to kegs. Life was simple and the beer was good.

Then Scott Janish upset the apple cart with his prognostication that one should first drop the yeast with a couple of days of soft-crashing to 50°F, then add the hops at that temperature, let them stand for only two days, then hard-crash everything to the bottom and rack, with the promise that the intensity of character would be maximized while minimizing hop creep. Life got complicated, but indeed, I loved the result and switched to that process.

But what I found, immediately, was dumping intact pellets into 50°F beer sends them straight to the bottom, "Check! Please!" In fact in the pre-Janish years I had always noticed when cold-crashing the hops would hit the bottom by the time the beer had dropped to 50°F. And if a goal is to leave the soft-crashed yeast sitting quietly on the bottom, swirling the beer to get the pellets to break up is verboten.

So I experimented with pulverizing the pellets, and on the first try I observed the pellet powder sitting proudly in a pile on top of the 50°F beer, which persisted hours into the day, until I finally rocked the carboy to get the rest of the pile to spread out, soak up more beer, and start to drift down. Definitely solved the "depth charging" effect with whole pellets, and I've stuck with this procedure ever since.

Cheers!