My first boil is fermenting

[jswordy]

We are in the secondary!



A homebrewing friend called me last night, which was very timely since my air lock had stopped bubbling. He said his beers typically finish at 3 days. He also said not to worry too much about headspace with beer but to put the carboy in the warmest room in the house for ale. Racked it over today. Tastes fine to me. All is well at this point.

Thanks for your process, Bernard. That was good reading. Now I'm out to rack over my blueberry wine in the cold shed, once it stops raining.

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Jim, Looks really good. I agree. I tend to find that if I pitch the yeast late Wednesday night by Sunday afternoon fermentation has slowed to a crawl.

You may want to keep the carboy covered (or in the dark). Ultraviolet light can result in the chemicals produced by the hops turning quite literally "skunky". I believe that the perfume sprayed by skunks has the same chemical composition as the reduction of the hop flavors by light.

 

[Elmer]

I dont know how accurate this is, but I have been getting advice from brewers, that you can stay in a primary bucket for 2 weeks and then bottle.
I was told to avoid racking and exposure to oxygen, I know most directions indicate to do a 2 stage ferment, So I am quite torn on this.
However if I can get it all done in primary all the better.
Or
why can I rack to a carboy for secondary and just add priming sugar from there and just bottle with the AIO?

Any reason not to?

 

[BernardSmith]

Elmer, I think today, most brewers only rack to a secondary if the beer needs aging (high ABV imperial stouts and the like) or if they are adding fruit and that sort of thing. As botigol suggests (post #18) brewers are near clinically psychotic about spoilage and have tremors at the idea of racking from one vessel into another unless that other is a keg into which they can pump CO2 ... You can certainly add your priming sugar into the primary and bottle from there but don't you have a layer of "trub" in that carboy? How will you adequately mix the sugar, keep the trub out of the bottles and do these two things before the sugar has had time to ferment out in the carboy? If you have no sediment in the primary then there is no good reason that I can see that would prevent you from using your fermenter as the bottling bucket. My own practice is to transfer from the primary (or the secondary) into a bucket or another carboy and bottle from there. Brewers swear by Star-san as their sanitizer. I use K-meta and am more laid back. But then I brew a gallon at a time and not a brewery's worth of beer so my experience may be quite different.

 

[Elmer]

Bernard,
my thought is this- finish in primary, rack to a carboy for bottling. Then add priming sugar, stir and use the AIO to bottle from the carboy!

 

[BernardSmith]

I think that your proposed method should work fine. Good luck with this brew.
PS I see that you have included what looks like a chanukiah as part of your new avatar. I think though, if that is what it is , it has too few elements. It should have eight candle holders plus one additional one if it is to be lit during the eight nights of Chanukah. I think yours has 7 ... So perhaps it is designed for Kwanzaa.

 

[jswordy]

My advice from brewers is to use a secondary for up to 3 weeks. They are adament, too: A secondary means clearer beer. And secondaries mean it will clear faster. I've found this true with wine, too. If you rack rapidly, it clears faster.

I have caught up with a friend who started out home brewing and now is a brewmaster/part owner of a craft beer business producing hundreds of gallons a week (http://www.yellowhammerbrewery.com/), and I'm following that advice while acknowledging that there are lots of ways to do it, just as with wine.

As long as your yeast is not completely dormant and there is residual CO2 in the beer, one of my homebrewing friends says, you do not have to worry about oxidation in carboy. He says if the 3-piece airlock on your primary has the cap inside raised, you are good. If you transfer to carboy and the cap again raises, you are good to go. It does not have to actually bubble to have a protective carbon dioxide layer in there.

Of course, minimize splashing on transfer.

Just like with wine, my carboys are never left uncovered. It doesn't make for a very good picture that way, though.

As an aside, I don't understand why so many transfer beer to an open bottling bucket before bottling, if there is such concern over oxidation. I won't be doing that. It will all be carboys from here to the bottle.

As with wine, I use Easy Clean as a sanitizer. I will run the bottles in a hot dishwasher cycle using only water before bottling.

Pretty confident now that this first effort will succeed. Designing a recipe that's more complex for my second effort, whenever that may happen. (I like winemaking better so far.) Thanks for the help!

 

[jswordy]

Regress report: Not swaggering with confidence anymore. This may be a case of too many cooks spoiling the stew. Looked last night and saw what looked like a few clumps of bubbles on top. Looked this morning, they look more like white mold clusters. Tasted the beer; it still tastes and smells fine to me. It's pretty clear.

I sanitized everything to the max. I should have strictly followed the Coopers instructions and bottled immediately after primary, up to 6 days out from pitching max. I am at Day 8 now.

On top of my beer apparently being infected, I'm infected. So with a cold/flu, I am prepping my bottles in the dishwasher right now to try to save this batch.

My plan is to siphon the middle three-quarters of the beer into a new carboy, discard the rest, and bottle. If yeast are viable, the priming sugar should kick them off and hopefully they will kill off any invaders if I got ahead of it fast enough.

Looks to me like wine making is a lot easier and mellower experience. But then, I knew that going in. Well, we'll know in a couple weeks if it's toilet water or not. Wish me luck!

 

[BernardSmith]

Good luck, Jim and feel better. Not clear to me why the gods take delight in spoiling wines made from boiled grains yet seem to leave the wines made from unheated fruit pretty much alone. I wonder if Prometheus has second thoughts about his fire being used for Dionysis and the Bacchae.

As for the open bottling bucket I think part of the reason is because that is what brewers do and part of the reason is that they find it easier to bottle using a spigot than a siphon and few glass carboys come ported. Even so, a ported (plastic) carboy would presumably tend to collapse into itself as a vacuum would slowly build if the top was capped and the vessel was being emptied of fluid... Perhaps brewers possess some shared ancient cultural memory of mishaps when they bottle from carboys....and how like magic the beer might stop flowing into the bottle before the carboy was even half empty...

 

[jswordy]

Waiting on my dishwasher, so I thought I'd try to take a pic. Harder than heck to actually do with any resolution through glass, so I circled them. Anyway...



New to the beer. So I may be over-reacting. But better safe than sorry. No whitish film on surface, so that's good. Smells and tastes fine as far as I can tell.

I sure do like the fact that wine over 10% ABV is practically indestructible!

 

[jswordy]

Well, it turns out I was over-reacting, a case of the newbs. Just caring too much! Once I started bottling,the "mold" on the surface disappeared. But it reappeared in the standing dregs of the secondary later. So it WAS bubbles, very very tiny and very concentrated. Ah, we learn something!

Anyway, the beer was clear and ready so I proceeded. It tastes really great flat. I am hoping that dry and bubbly it will be even better!

Thanks again to everyone who commented here. The help, as you can see, was badly needed. Now in 2 weeks we will see if I have what it takes to try a different batch.



I got a 55 bottle yield. ABV is between 5.5-6% (I didn't worry over exactness).



That bottle capper is from like 1965. It was given to me by an old guy I bought some carboys from. Works fine.

 

[BernardSmith]

ha! I have the same capper! Mine also works fine although I think the threads are reversed the way the handle needs to be lifted to raise the rod. I often find that I am lowering the handle just when I want to raise it another inch or so... and I have placed a small block of wood on that metal foot on which I stand my bottles on so that I am not so near the end of the threads when the capper closes around the cap ...

 

[Elmer]

This thread had been very informational.
I just bought my first brew Hophead Pale ale. Plan on joining the "wine makers who make beer" club this weekend

 

[BernardSmith]

Good luck, Elmer. Brewing is far more labor intensive than wine making - it is not surprising that brewers refer to the time they spend brewing as their "brew day"... Cannot speak for anyone else but I think you need to stand pretty close to your kettle for the hours (literally) it takes to mash, then boil and then cool the wort. You need to watch/control the temperature and then you need to watch to make sure that what is called the hot break does not in fact cause a boil over, and then if you are adding flavoring hops you need to watch the time to add the hops at different points in the boil. After the wort has been prepared you need to watch to make sure the pitching temperature has been hit. Those who brew using extract can reduce that time very considerably... but the upside is that low gravity beers are ready for drinking in about a month and a bottle of your own craft beer can taste wonderful after a day of hard mental or physical exertion

 

[jswordy]

ha! I have the same capper! Mine also works fine although I think the threads are reversed the way the handle needs to be lifted to raise the rod. I often find that I am lowering the handle just when I want to raise it another inch or so... and I have placed a small block of wood on that metal foot on which I stand my bottles on so that I am not so near the end of the threads when the capper closes around the cap ...

Haha, I did the same thing with the wood. The capper will not go far enough down for Heineken bottles, which is what I found that day at the recycler.

Does your capper make an indentation in the center of the cap? I found to get them snug tight to where they will not twist, I need to press down enough that it dents the middle.

Hey, it was free!

 

[BernardSmith]

Mine was also free... Cannot recall now who gave me it and yes, it makes a small indentation on the cap.. I wonder if they all did! But I much prefer this to the two handed models that are available today...

 

[jswordy]

This thread had been very informational.
I just bought my first brew Hophead Pale ale. Plan on joining the "wine makers who make beer" club this weekend
View attachment 19843

Good luck Elmer! Start your own thread on brew day so we see how it works out!

 

[petey_c]

Lots of good info in this thread. Okay, I'm part of the brewers-who-also-make-wine club. I've been brewing for a little over four years. I recently made about 7.5 gals of wine (1.5 gals of Pinot Noir (see my thread on disaster...) and 6 of Cab.). When I finished my first step, I thought I'd done something wrong, missed a step somehow. I was re-assured by my wine making friends that all was good. I made a batch of New Zealand Rye IPA the other day and it took me about four hours from start to finish. Much more involved than kit wine making (so far...). Most of the labor with brewing is up front before the primary.
Mostly no need to secondary unless you're adding fruit. Three weeks in the primary and three weeks in the bottle is a good general rule. The instructions that come with most kit beers are crap. Heavier beers (stouts, porters, meads and higher ABV levels) benefit from longer bottle conditioning times (3+ months). Wheat beers are drinkable very quickly (10 days or so). I only use glass bottles for brews that need aging. I use PET bottles for everything else. I've found that cappers are a PITA. Everybody gets a starsan bath before bottling, twist a cap on then off to the next. Another advantage to PET bottles is you get a good idea of carbonation. As carbonation increases the bottles get harder and harder. The Cooper carb tabs are a good idea, although I've never had luck with them. I believe it's one tab to a "stubbie" (350ml or about 12oz). As has been said here, about 1 ounce of corn sugar per gallon of brew for priming. If you have some stuff that's floating on top of your beer many times you can rack from underneath it and still have great beer. You can use clarifiers (fining) such as Irish Moss, Whirlfloc, etc. to help some of that stuff drop out of solution. I'm guessing that you wouldn't need it with strictly extract brews. It's more for all grain or mini-mashes. I hope you'll excuse my rambling on....

 

[petey_c]

This thread had been very informational.
I just bought my first brew Hophead Pale ale. Plan on joining the "wine makers who make beer" club this weekend
View attachment 19843

Elmer, Have those grains been crushed or is it my old eyes?

 

[Elmer]

Elmer, Have those grains been crushed or is it my old eyes?

Yes they have, just a bad photo.

Jswordy, that is an excellent idea I will I've it a try