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You might like the book How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.
A Post of Words with Tom Pitt
- Thread starter Tom Pitt
- Start date
Thanks! I will check it out.
NAOS
Well-Known Member
Rad
AverageJoe
Well-Known Member
Mainly how not to **** it up. Went into a shop the other day and the owner was all to happy to tell me all about it. Not an auditory learner so my eyes kind of glazed over when he started going into detail. Going back in tommorow to pick up a kit for an Irish Red and excited to get started but heard it's hard to pull off, though the shopkeeper was fairly reassuring. Any pitfalls to avoid? Someone was telling me they had a hard time getting a batch that wasn't vinegary. Any specific tips for that? Not fully in the weeds yet. Would be interested to hear what you have concocted and how you got there...thanks in advance.
I'm about to head out the door but I'll write something this eve for sure.
Are you local (SLC)? What shop? If Salt City Brew Supply they are awesome. Nothing wrong with The Beer Nut either.
I haven't brewed in months but I'm actually headed to SCBS right now and plan to brew on Wednesday.
NAOS
Well-Known Member
Just remember, when you decide a Tuesday should feel like a Saturday, a Corona gets its lime. Emmk?
AverageJoe
Well-Known Member
Not local unfortunately. All the way up the road in Calgary. Told my shop keep I was aiming for "quaffable" and that had him rolling his eyes out of their sockets. If my first go round goes well I might aim higher. I'm keen but this is really just a project to keep me busy, so don't worry about it if you don't have time. Had some great beer when I was in the SLC area. Really curious to hear your thoughts.
So I'm going to make some assumptions.
First I assume you're going to use a recipe kit. These are generally made to produce 5 gallons (19ltr). And most of them will either use only malt extract (liquid or dry) or a combination of malt extract and "steeping grains." If all that is true then this should be relevant advice.
Early spring is one of the best times for new brewers to pick up the hobby. You being up north helps even that much more. The absolute number one thing that can make your beer very good or very bad is the fermentation temperature the first 3 day of active fermentation. And generally you want that temp to be in the low 60f range (~17c). But it's also very important to avoid large temp swings. I'd call anything more than 5f or 2-3c a big swing. I don't want to get into the weeds but I believe (not a scientific fact) that when yeast start cooling down significantly, even if temps are still well within their happy operating range, that they begin to go dormant. I'll add some extra details on that below since it'll get me too sidetracked right now. So if you have a nice cool spot in your house, garage or wherever that stays at a fairly consistent temp, use that place. Favor the place that is reasonably cool and stays the same temp over a place that gets exactly the temp you want but heats up or cools down significantly.
On that topic, if the instructions tell you to pitch the yeast on the hot side (like 21c or more) DON'T DO IT! Yes, it will help get things going but you run the risk of temps getting out of control. Fermentation is an exothermic process. If you put your fermentation vessel in a 17c room the beer inside is likely 19-22c during the most active part of fermentation. Heat is the gas pedal for yeast metabolism. If it ferments hot it ferments faster, but with a higher energy fermentation comes more ester production (often presents as a peachy flavor) or phenolic flavor (at low levels this can be sort of banana like flavor, stronger and they are like a clove flavor and very strong they are like a band-aid or medicinal flavor). Now some beers are supposed to have either noticeable ester flavors (traditional English beers) and others are supposed to have low to medium phenolic flavors (a German Hefeweizen should have at least some banana like flavor and some venture into a light clove flavor). But if you go hotter still, like 25c-32c you're going to start producing fusel alcohol. Fusel alcohol translates from German to mean "bad alcohol" and it smells like rubbing alcohol and tastes harsh and is very likely to give you a headache. So this is one of the most common way to make an undrinkable beer. Don't ferment too hot.
I want to stress something. The package of yeast, weather dry or liquid, is going to have a temperature range on it that supposedly it is okay to ferment at. Keep two things in mind. First, that range is a lie. Almost all yeast produce cleaner flavors right at the bottom end of that temp range. For your first beer don't get fancy, some people might brew at the top of the range on purpose to promote ester or phenol production, that's not for beginners. The risk is that you get a stalled fermentation if you are too cold. That's when the yeast go dormant before the beer is fully fermented. But as long as you avoid big temp swings I think you'll be okay. If fermentation seems to be going way too slow after 48hrs move the fermenter to a warmer part of the house. More on gauging fermentation activity below. Second, as mentioned above, the actual beer is hotter during active fermentation than the ambient room temp, so take that into consideration.
But before you ferment the beer you have to make the beer. So while I started a little out of order, that's because fermentation temp is much more critical than the making the beer part. With an extract kit this is like making a big batch of soup. Follow the instructions and you'll be golden. However, there is one beer ruining possibility lurking in this part of beer making. Chlorine! If your water has chlorine or chloramines (a more stable and harder to get rid of form of chlorine) you'll want to do something to get rid of it. If it's just chlorine you can simply collect your water the night before and leave it open to the air and the chlorine will evaporate. If its chloramines you'll have to take additional measures. Honestly the easiest thing to do is to pick up some Campden tablets (or use potassium metabisulfite or sodium metabisulfite) at the homebrew store. Campden is produced primarily for wine makers so that they can completely kill off the yeast after fermentation before they move onto whatever the next step for wine making is. But it's very useful for beer makers as a water treatment. One tablet can eliminate the chlorine in 20 gallons of water. So a 1/4 tablet will work fine if you're making 5 gallons. If chlorine as not removed it creates a chlorophenolic compound, and it never has a nice banana or clove flavor, it's all band-aid flavor and aroma.
Other than that follow the directions. Better if you can do a full boil, which is to say that you start with about 6 gallons of water, boil it all with the extract and hops, then cool and add to the fermenter. It's okay if you have to do what's called a partial boil, which would be to use something like 3 gallons of water, then add additional water into the fermenter after you transfer the wort. The only drawback is that hops can only add so much of their bittering to a given volume of water. If you do a partial boil you may get less bittering and or hops flavor and aroma than you would have with a full boil. With an Irish Red you're probably fine. If you were making a double IPA you probably wouldn't be fine. Adding more hops wouldn't help, you've saturated that volume of water with all the alpha acids it can extract from the hops.
Okay, so that's the basics for now. Feel free to ask me any questions.
Bonus round:
So my theory on yeast starts with me imagining what yeast get up to in nature. They float around and collect on the skin of growing fruit. That white stuff on the outside of a nectarine is yeast, just sitting there waiting for a break in the skin so that they can get to work. Once yeast finds that break in the skin they start eating, and multiplying. They warm up through their own activity and it signals the yeast cell next to them to get going, multiplying and then eating as much sugar as it can. Once the sugar starts running out they begin to cool down, which signals them to go into a protective dormant stage. Once they go dormant they can be carried by the wind and land on the next piece of fruit or whatever. So in brewing I try to imagine the world through the eyes of the yeast. You pitch a package of yeast into a huge pool of sugar. This is about as good as it gets. These yeast begin by multiplying like crazy. It's important to note that yeast are able to multiply without oxygen, but they multiply MUCH slower. If there is available oxygen one cell can produce 8 additional yest cells at a time. Without and it can only produce one additional yeast cell at a time. So a lot slower. Anyway, they start by using the sugar to multiply. Once things start getting a little crowded they stop multiplying and start eating. They will ferment the majority of a batch in the first 3 days.
But let's say on day two there's a significant dip in temps. Well, that's a signal to the yeast that the feast is coming to an end and most of them begin to go dormant. So that's fine, right? We just warm them back up and they'll get going again. Wrong! The situation now is nothing like it was in the good old days when you first pitched the yeast and they started to multiply and then feast. Now there is a lot less food. Like a lot less. So it's already crowded with yeast in there. They aren't in the same rhythm. Not only is there a lot less food and no oxygen, but yeast produce alcohol as a byproduct of fermentation. That's their waste product. They can survive some amount of alcohol, but only so much, and they don't like it. You're trying to get the yeast going again, but this is like trying to get a party started again at 2:30am after the police came through. Yeah, there may be a little beer left over, but the place is a mess, there's puke on the couch, half the people are passed out and the house is a wreck. Party's over.
So if this happens and your yeast stop before you reach your expected terminal gravity just accept it and move on. Pitching more yeast is not the answer. There's literally 100s of times more yeast in the fermenter than you can pitch from a package. The problem isn't if there is yeast in there, it's that the environment is no longer right for yeast to get going. If you find yourself in that situation let me know. There are a few things that can be done, but it's going to depend on the specifics if I think it's worth doing them.
So how do you know if your yeast is active. Typical advice is that you should not rely on the airlock activity (the bubbles) to tell you when fermentation is finished. That's true. But as long as you're airtight and all the escaping gas is going through the airlock then it's a good way to get a visual read on how active fermentation is. So if after 48hours (and it can take 48 hours for yeast to get going, don't start really stressing until then) you don't have any significant airlock activity, first make sure the lid is tight, that the grommet is making a good seal and all that. If that's good go ahead and take a peak. I don't advise that you open the fermenter much or at all if possible, but at this moment you'll want to have a look. If there is a big foamy thing on top of the beer, it's called krausen, then it's fermenting. You have air escaping somehow. Your airlock is not going to be very active. Don't panic, don't go to extreme lengths to fix this. The worst thing you could do would be to transfer the beer out of that vessel or agitate it too much. There is one more thing at this stage that can make an otherwise good beer taste bad, that's oxygen. If you expose your fermented beer to oxygen it will dramatically lose flavor. This is generally described as beer that tastes like cardboard. So just ride it out. Not the very best thing to have a small leak, much much worse to agitate the beer, exposing it to way more oxygen through a massive increase in surface area in direct contact with oxygen. But extended aging is no longer a good idea at this point. You're going to want to package the beer as soon as fermentation is all the way finished.
Okay, that's kind of a lot for now. Like I said, feel free to ask questions.
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NAOS
Well-Known Member
So did you ever make any beer?
AverageJoe
Well-Known Member
Yup! Sorry meant to get back to you. Basketball stopped happening and i sort of forgot that this forum existed. Drunk through 90% of my first batch. For a first try I was really pleased with the results. Possibly I'm overvaluing the quality because of the "made it myself" factor but i think it was easily comparable to many commercial brews I've had over the years. Bottled my second batch about a week ago and also had a test best I bottled a little earlier where I experimented with a couple additives which I was meaning to get your read on. Not in love with the aroma I achieved there but early tastings are perfectly drinkable. Curious to see how my un-tampered with batch comes out. I found the whole process to be really enjoyable and already it's a bit of an obsession for me. Planning to do another batch (hopefully fully from scratch) as soon as I can get my hands on the ingredients. Really cant thank you enough for your original post on the subject. Really got me off and running and more importantly - enthused- from the off.
If you're up for it I might have a couple questions for you, and curious to know what you've been working on as well. Cheers and thanks again.
Definitely up for it! Ask away.
