It may not be the right season for a light golden ale, but one of the things I love about brewing my own beer is the ability to decide what I feel like brewing no matter what season. For this batch I am taking a recipe for a classic American ale with some quality northwestern hops, and also including some fresh local honey. This brew is actually a gift for my father and brother-in-law so I used some local honey from their area (Brevard County, Florida) to add in some of those nice local flavors.
Recipe:
6 pounds Extra Light DME
2 cups Crystal 10L malt
4 cups unpasteurized wildflower blossom honey
1.75 ounces Willamette bittering pellet hops (50 minutes)
0.5 ounces Cascade flavoring whole hops (10 minutes)
0.5 ounces Cascade aromatic whole hops (2 minutes)
First we dissolved the DME into 2 gallons of warm water. After the DME was completely dissolved we added the malts and the honey (I warmed the honey for about 30 seconds ahead of time in the microwave to make it easier to pour) into the brew pot. Warmed the mix for about 20 minutes and then adjusted the heat up to achieve a nice low boil. Again, we approached boiling slowly, not only to avoid boil over but also to maximize the amount of time the malts sat in the brew pot. When a good low rolling boil was achieved I pulled the bag of malts out and dropped in the bittering hops. To ensure all of the flavor of the malts stays with the wort I strain the malts over the brew pot throughout the boil pressing the malts a few times to drain all the remaining liquid into the wort. After 40 minutes added the whirlfloc tablet and the flavoring whole hops and continued the boil for a final 10 minutes. Two minutes before the boil completed we dropped in the last aromatic hops.
So far everything had been pretty much the same as the other brew procedures. Usually I cool the wort prior to adding the additional water using a standard wort chiller (copper tube heat exchanger) but this time I elected to let the wort cool more slowly. I placed the brew pot into the cool sink and let it sit for about an hour. I placed the lid over the brew pot which clearly reduced the rate at which heat escaped from the brew pot but I felt that decreasing the risk of contamination was worth the added layer and the reduced heat transfer.
After the hour had passed, the pot itself was still plenty warm but the temperature of the wort itself was down to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I filtered the wort into the primary and added water through the filtered hops to bring the total volume up to 5 gallons. I then took a sample from the primary prior to adding the yeast.
This is where this batch gets a little funky.
The γg of the of this sample was planned for around 1.056, my reading was in excess of 1.1. Now, first of all, the γg of the liquid is clearly dependent heavily on the temperature so my inclination is to write this off as a bad reading since the liquid still feels warm to the touch and is probably up in the 100 + range. Using my spoon I mix the wort well and add the previously activated liquid yeast and sit back and wait.
This batch started fermenting early, we noticed active fermentation within the first 5 hours after sealing of the primary. The other change for this batch of activation of the liquid yeast prior pitching. These were the directions on the packaging for the yeast, and I decided to follow them- shocking, I know. Obviously pleased with the quick start to fermentation, I tracked the progress over the next few days. I expected the off gassing of CO2 to die out almost completely within 3-5 days, if not sooner due to the rapid on-set, which has been the case in previous batches. In this batch though, that was far from the case. At 7 days out from brew day fermentation was only finally starting to taper out (≈ 10 bubbles per minute).
Our most recent brewing experience had undergone what can only be described as flash fermentation, and as a result this extended fermentation cycle was causing me to be quite antsy. On day 7 I sampled for the γg and got 1.012 which was actually a hair under the 1.015 I was aiming for. Given where the γg was I decided to rack into the secondary and of course take the all important taste test. The flavor was good but there did seem to be more alcohol taste than I am used to out of my home brewed batches.
The question now is, what happened? Based on my admittedly limited knowledge (no chemistry major here) I came up with two competing thoughts. First, the γg of the original sample was way off, off by around 0.05. That to me seems like a rather wild variation based on temperature alone. The other thought was that the honey contributed heavily (more so than anticipated) to the fermentable sugars and that quite by accident we have ended up with a high gravity brew. It could be a combination of the two, as well, and that is most likely the case but I felt it was important to identify the two processes at work here. Only the final taste test will tell, so its time to sit back and wait again and see what bottling turns up.
No comments:
Post a Comment