Second Floor Brewing

As you may know, early last week SFB held an internal but candid discussion.  The topic: get better or quit.  We came up with some best practices to follow and left the meeting with a renewed resolve!  Better beer seemed so close, so simple.  Next up: reality (read The Joys of Brewing around the Holidays).  Because of Christmas, et al, we were not able to remove chlorine by boiling our brew water and letting it sit out overnight nor were we able to create a yeast starter.  On brew day, I tried to remedy those mistakes by boiling the brew water and letting is cool until needed and by buying two slap packs of American Ale yeast (instead of just one which I would put into a starter) and warming them on the ride home both in my armpits and on the car dash while the heat was on.  I think it worked.

At TJB, I took the oppourtunity to ask Tom about our bottles and if they could be the reason for the low levels of carbonation we have seen.  He freaked out when he saw the bottles we use to carbonate.  We use some bobo half gallon jugs to bottle condition.  Tom thought that we would have exploded a bottle or two by now.  Fortunately, he sells the exact bottles we use (for transportation or yeast cultivation, he says)  so he had a couple of different lids for them.  I bought a few metal tops and a few pastic tops simlar to the tops we use now except Tom’s tops have an extra cone of plastic attached to the underside of the cap that, when tighted, should plug any holes in the screw groves. 

Bottle and brew! New caps in place, my guess is that Restoration Red will be either the first of our brews to explode one of our glass jugs or be the first of our brews to enjoy consistent carbonation from bottle to bottle.  Either way, we are working (drinking) to resolve the bottle problems.  We have begun collection of empty Malheur 12 bottles, a yummy Belgian Quad(?) and SFB brewer’s favorite from way back when.  Their corks are easy to but back into the bottle and we can save the gold twist caps for extra security.  Our bobo half gallon jugs may be a thing of the past.

The work this weekend was brewing the Imperial Oatmeal Stout.  I created the recipe ended up needed about 10 lbs of grain plus about a pound of oats. This is, by far, the most grain we have ever used.  I wanted an OG of 1.090 so we also had to use five pounds of extract.  It was tough going for a while but we only lost a gallon of water to the grain and boiling (almost exactly what we expected).  It cooled to an OG of 1.088ish which I am really pleased with.  I pitched the two armpit yeasties and (another new practice) moved the primary fermenter into a closet, out of the sunlight.  There was a decent level of activity after 9 hours!

I would be getting ahead of myself if I were to say that we, at SFB, have “learned our lesson” from the failures of our first few brews. We have definitely learned some things, e.g. don’t buy the bottle of LME covered with dust, don’t brew drunk, aerate the wort, etc… Overall, however, the quality of our beer has begun to plateau. We had some discussions yesterday and from those discussions, we have decided to make some changes to our brewing processes, effective EEE-mmediately. They are listed in whole (or in as whole as possible) below.

• Start with pure, chlorine-free water. We will boil and let the water sit out overnight.
• Be more thorough during the cleaning and sanitation. All containers, all instruments will cleaned and sanitized (now that we have cleaning and sanitation products).
• Pitch the yeast into the middle of the primary fermenter. Currently we pitch on top of the wort, inside the carboy. We will try to pour in some of the wort, pitch, and pour in the rest of the wort.
• Move the primary fermentation carboy into a dark place or cover it with a blanket during fermentation. Take that, precious sunlight!
• Rack the beer in another carboy after primary fermentation subsides. We have not had a place to put green beer until recently. This carboy will be kept out of the sunlight as well.
• Double the time spent bottle conditioning the beer. Most of the time we let the beer sit for just one week. That is increasing to at least two.
• Stay on the lookout for new ways to better our brewing.

In other news, the pale ales that were carbonated were delicious! The ones that were not carbonated lost all of their floral notes and retained only a stringent bitterness. Restoration Red is on its way! We will bottle this weekend upcoming. I am thinking that we will probably brew up that oatmeal stout that I mentioned last TMQ. After that, however, I am thinking about a Celebration Ale. The celebration, in this case, will be due to my birthday which will be around the time that beer is ready to drink. I will continue to ignore Jessica’s requests for a holiday beer.