#rye pa

[theartofhomebrewing-blog]

Stuck Fermentation

So I mentioned in my last homebrewing update that after 6 months I finally got back into the game. I also mentioned how the first hurdle I had to overcome was remembering how to brew.

I waited a couple more days and the 2 week mark finally rolled around. This is when I had planned on dry-hopping. I gave it another gravity read and still... 1.022 SG. Okay, now I know something is wrong. Decided I'd give it a bit of a shake to get the yeast suspended again and maybe kickstart it. Nope, 2 days later same reading. Figured I may as well pitch a bit more dry yeast. Looked promising and a couple days later, 1.022 SG. Well, shit...

What appears to be happening is that I messed up my mash. I think I mashed in too hot and cooked some of the malt, creating unfermentable sugars. Now the wort doesn't taste sweet at all, completely dry (tastes pretty good too), but I don't want to risk gushing bottles or even bottle bombs from an underfermented beer. Luckily I have an ace up my sleeve.

Wyeast 3711 - French Saison. This is the Takeru Kobayashi of the yeast world. It will eat anything. Luckily it is pretty clean too, so I don't expect too many new flavors to come into play, maybe a touch of pepper, but I'll live with that. Unfortunately all the LHBS in my area carry White Labs only. Now WL is usually my go to choice in liquid yeast, but there is no alternative to Wyeast 3711, none that will eat anything and everything that other yeasts can't. This means I'll be ordering it offline, and waiting a few more days before I get this problem solved and start my dry-hop.

There's a solution to every problem in homebrewing. It just might not be the first one that comes to mind.

[theartofhomebrewing-blog]

I'm back in the saddle again...

One of my first hurdles was remembering how to brew. I devoted so much time to learning every intricate detail that I had to take a step back and try and bring all that knowledge back. Hell, it had been a few months since I designed my recipe. I hardly even remembered what I was brewing (a rye-influenced Pale Ale.) It wasn't that hard to get back in to it. There were a couple of minor speed bumps and times where I had to just sit and pull out a book, or two, to dial in some of the minor details I had originally planned. For example: I'm brewing a session beer and in order to give it a bit more body I wanted to mash-in around 162°F. I wound up with more of a 158°F mash. Not a huge deal, just minor things.

One fairly major problem arose during the boil. I decided to do a 90-minute boil instead of the more traditional 60-minute. What I didn't take into account was calibrating my flame/kettle for the longer boil time. One problem I had was that I couldn't get my wort to a steady boil. It was either a vigorous boil or no boil at all*. As you could probably imagine, this led to a little bit of an evaporation problem. My ~6 gallon wort turned into a 3.75 gallon batch once added to the fermenter. Yeah.... I boiled off way more than I had planned. It didn't really effect my gravity that much though, so I guess it's better than the previous IC malfunction of the White IPA.

Speaking of the White IPA. The reason I've finally started brewing again is because I finally got around to fixing/finishing my immersion chiller. No leaks this time, or ever again. It felt great to finally have it finished, knowing that it wont be holding me back anymore. I did find a small dilemma though; summer-time hose water. When I first started building the chiller it was October and when it broke it was February. I had always been chilling with Autumn/Winter water. Getting down to 70°F was never an issue. Turns out in the middle of summer it likes to plateau around 85°F. Not a big deal. Summer is almost over. It's an issue I can push off until next year.

*Upon typing this I've remembered that I had adjusted the air intake when cleaning the immersion chiller a week ago. This is probably why I couldn't fine tune my boil like I could in the past.

That about sums up this brewing experience. It seems every time I introduce a new piece of equipment into the mix my clean-up gets longer and more tedious. Anyone have any tips/tricks for post brew wrap-up?