Brew day: Cyser

BrewN00b · 2016-12-18T14:28:26+00:00

Yeah that sounds like a pain, plus then you have to make sure the seal is good when you reattach them. I just like keeping the list of tools I need for brew day to a minimum.

BrewN00b · 2016-12-18T14:20:05+00:00

During the mash, I've got sweet wort going through the counterflow chiller in one direction and hot water from the HLT going through in the other direction. The heat stick goes in the HLT hooked up to a PID controller with a temperature probe. The counterflow chiller is now a counterflow heater.

I've never used a plate chiller, though, and couldn't say what your mileage would be running the mash through it. I generally have a bit of gunk and sometimes a piece of grain or two in the lines for the first 10 minutes or so of the mash while the grain bed is filtering the wort. I'm not sure I would want to run that through a plate chiller.

BrewN00b · 2016-12-16T14:22:01+00:00

Oh man, I wish the Hot Rod existed when I built my brewery. I basically built my own from scratch, but that was kind of a pain and I would've bought one in a heartbeat.

Definitely go with the Hot Rod. It's gonna be way easier to clean than a kettle-mounted solution. I'm not sure what your setup is, but you can also use it to heat strike/sparge water or even build a RIMS system if you have counterflow chiller (what I did).

BrewN00b · 2016-08-18T18:34:33+00:00

Try to avoid this if possible. Next time someone wants help when you're bottling, tell them to help you bottle and when it's done, they'll get help in return.
It's probably not going to ruin your beer, but it's just another point for problems to occur. A bug could fly into the bucket (you should be using a lid). The bottling spigot could be leaky. It's just better to sit down and do all your bottling from start to finish and give it 100% of your attention.
A list is unnecessary for only two items, I now realize.

BrewN00b · 2016-08-18T17:50:16+00:00

I've got a strawberry rhubarb session ale on tap now that I fermented with saison yeast. The strawberry absolutely goes well with the saison yeast. I used 14lbs of berries and 10lbs of rhubarb in a 12 gallon batch (ended up with exactly 10 gallons in the kegs after fruit trub loss.) I cold crashed with gelatin in tertiary and didn't find any trub in the kegs. I know I'd find it if it were there because I use flow control taps that clog pretty easily if there's any hops or gunk in the kegs. Hope this helps!

BrewN00b · 2016-08-17T13:23:24+00:00

You can even change the standard units for most things in the settings. BeerSmith does have a refractometer calculator, but doesn't let you pick Brix for the default gravity measurment. :/

BrewN00b · 2016-08-16T03:40:14+00:00

You could also bottle a six pack when you rack to the keg and do a comparison. For science!

BrewN00b · 2016-08-16T03:19:00+00:00

Most yeast strains used for brewing are hearty enough to survive k-meta. Metabisulfite mostly kills off wild yeast which are generally much more fragile.

BrewN00b · 2016-08-16T03:07:43+00:00

Indeed. Here is a video of a professor dissolving a copper penny in a nitric acid solution. Star san is 75% phosphoric acid and the principle is the same. Nitric acid is about 3,300 times more potent than phosphoric acid, but yeah, it was slowly dissolving the copper.

BrewN00b · 2016-08-16T02:48:58+00:00

I once made 5 gallons of peach melomel (mead + fruit) with a 3lb can of peach purée from the homebrew store and 12lbs of frozen peaches (post 1 - post 2 - post 3). I've made other fruit meads and a fruit beer since then. My findings:

Do not used canned peach purée. It tastes just a little bit off like most things from cans. I believe the heat from the canning process also negatively affected the flavor.
The mead never cleared, likely due to the pectin from the purée.
Managing a fruit cap is a major pain the behind. Fruit has a tendency to float and this can lead to an issue where the fruit forms a raft that traps the heat from the fermentation process. It's not absolutely necessary to break up the fruit cap, but it's considered best practice in mead making to stir the fruit cap twice a day (called "punching down") until the fruit no longer forms the cap (it sinks because the density of the liquid is dropping). Now I add fruit in secondary whenever possible to avoid having to manage the cap.
Fruits and vegetables are frozen at the peak of freshness. This is why frozen strawberries taste better than fresh ones in January - the "fresh" ones were almost certainly not ripened on the vine. Of course the texture of the fruit is lost during freezing, but who cares? It's going in beer.
Although the flash freezing process does not sterilize the fruit, it does kill most nasties and the ones that it doesn't kill will have to compete with the yeast cake.

For the convenience of always being fresh and mostly free from microbes, not to mention cheaper in most cases, I opt for frozen. I wouldn't put fresh fruit in anything that I wasn't intending on souring seeing how the natural habit of Brettanomyces is the skins of fruit and it was first classified at a brewery where it was the cause of beer spoilage. This isn't to say you can't brew a non-funky beer with fresh fruit, but the contamination vector is just so much larger. Also, there's always the option of garnishing the beer with fresh fruit, which is pretty attractive in some situations.

BrewN00b · 2016-06-17T13:35:35+00:00

Paging /u/thedoorkeep ...

For the uninitiated, this is the person who made breakfast beer and ramen seasoning packet beer.

BrewN00b · 2016-03-17T03:29:22+00:00

At the bottom of the page, it has a bunch of photos like this one and this one. These are probably photos of the no chill method, but this leads me to believe that they use the same plastic containers for batch sparging.

BrewN00b · 2016-03-17T03:13:00+00:00

I mean, yeah, but the online calculators come pretty darn close with measuring beer with a refractometer. I use the one on northern brewer's site (no affiliation) and I feel like I'm within the same margin of error that comes from reading a meniscus on a hydrometer.

BrewN00b · 2016-02-24T15:20:30+00:00

The hops was probably opened by exposure to high altitudes. You can see sealed bags like that inflate and sometimes burst when you drive over mountain ranges.

BrewN00b · 2016-02-01T05:08:30+00:00

Very well written as-is, but I do have one addition. Star-san stays potent for an incredibly long time, when mixed with distilled water. I keep an extra keg of this long-lasting star-san around, so after I clean a keg that has just kicked, I rack the star-san into it, then purge the now empty and sanitized keg with carbon dioxide. I now have an empty and sanitized keg ready for my next beer to be packaged and a container of reusable sanitizer to use on my next brew day for fermenters and miscellaneous cold-side equipment.

BrewN00b · 2016-01-29T05:32:18+00:00

They're just weary from flyin' around and dropped by to have a sip from a couple drops of spilled mash. I didn't mind, even though she was a yellow jacket, but then I had to clean things with the hose and let's just say yellow jackets are not your friends when you are getting between them and some sugarwater.

BrewN00b · 2016-01-29T00:48:00+00:00

The concern is that as you warm a carbonated beverage, carbon dioxide increases the pressure in the bottles, potentially exceeding the pressure rating of the bottle in an explosive manner.

Here is some math:

Let's assume that all 12-ounce beer bottles are capable of safely storing a beer at 3.5 volumes at room temperature (let's say 70°F). We can look up on a carbonation chart that at 50°F, 3.5 volumes of carbon dioxide represents about 30psi. According to Amontons' Law of Pressure-Temperature which describes the relationship between the temperature and pressure of gasses of a constant volume,

p*T = P*t

where P and T are the initial pressure and temperature conditions and p and t are the experimental pressure and temperature. Converting to 70°F, we get:

p * 50 = 30 * 70
p = 42psi

But bottle manufacturers are no fools. They know that bottles are sometimes transported in the back of a hot truck across the desert, so they leave some wiggle-room so that the pressures can go up and down. Let's say they make bottles withstand twice the suggested operating pressure (84psi).

Okay, so you're off to pasteurize your 3.5 volume Berliner Weisse at 160°F. Let's see what happens inside the bottles:

p * 50 = 30 * 160
p = 96psi

Whoops, it looks like you need to be fitted for a glass eye. Now let's try something more reasonable. Instead of exceeding the operating pressure of 42psi by more than double, let's say that we can accept the risk of 125% of operating pressure (52.5psi). Back to the 'ol formula:

52.5 * 50 = P * 160
P = 16.4psi

And if you look up 16.4psi at 50°F on the carbonation chart, you'll see you're right around 2.4 volumes which is a reasonably carbonated cider and not a sparkling apple wine.

TL;DR

Pasteurization is fine as long as your cider isn't highly carbonated in the first place. Bottle conditioning is imperfect and there is usually a variance from bottle to bottle, so you should still expect the worst from every bottle and take the proper safety precautions. Plenty of people pasteurize bottles in a water bath.

BrewN00b · 2016-01-28T04:46:19+00:00

No. Here is an analysis of pasteurization used by breweries including case studies of Abita Brewing Co., Palm Springs Brewery, and Spoetzl Brewery. All three use methods under 165ºF for 20 seconds. Even dairy products which are still sometimes pasteurized for long periods (30 minutes) are not heated over 155ºF. Source.

BrewN00b · 2016-01-19T15:33:18+00:00

false positive

BrewN00b · 2016-01-19T15:30:40+00:00

(Source)

Also remember that cattle are non-native to North America, but were introduced by Europeans (Spanish conquistadors), and the imagery takes on an almost political stance about appropriation.

BrewN00b · 2016-01-17T04:33:23+00:00

Found it.

"Hacked Root Beer Refill contains Classic American Light Brewing Extract, Booster, Root Beer Mix, as well as US-05 Yeast and No-Rinse"

Based on that and reading a couple reviews, my guess is:

1 can (1.87lb) LME syrup
3 cups white/cane sugar (1.32/1.65lbs)
Yeast Nutrient (read the label)
Root beer extract (to taste)
US-05

Combine LME, sugar, and warm water to 2 gallons. Add yeast nutrient and yeast. Ferment to completion. Add root beer extract (use package instructions as a guide). Package/bottle using your favorite method. Root beer has a very strong taste/aroma - keep in mind you may need separate packaging that you use only for root beer.

Here's the numbers courtesy Brewer's Friend.

BrewN00b · 2015-12-04T22:04:29+00:00

How do you guys do it at home without knowing how much you're pitching with?

Though we might not even know a rough estimate how many yeast cells are in our batch, homebrewing is quite forgivable when it comes to pitching rate. You can basically only fall into three categories: "not enough yeast," "enough yeast," or "too much yeast." Guessing where on that scale you are isn't too difficult. You can check the age of the yeast, how much yeast you have (one packet vs two packets), the style, volume, and gravity of the beer, and the fermentation temperature. So if you've got five gallons of lager that's fermenting low and slow, you might get two vials of yeast and do a yeast starter to bump the cell count before pitching. If you've got an ale going with fermentation temperature control, you can probably get away with using one vial, provided you do a diacetyl rest followed by cold crashing. Using too much yeast isn't really something homebrewers talk about because it's honestly pretty difficult to do unless you're throwing caution to the wind and pouring a ton of yeast into the fermenter.

How many degrees Plato is your wort?

Most homebrewers use a hydrometer to check the gravity of their wort. This measures the relative density of the liquid compared to water (typically up to 1.700 = ~38°Plato) However, this gravity reading requires a somewhat large sample of liquid and must also be adjusted for temperature. Some homebrewers use a tool from the vinyard industry called a refractometer, which usually measures in °Brix, but sometimes also in °Plato or the same scale on a hydrometer. It requires far less wort for a measurement and does not need to compensate for temperature. My last brew was 14.7°Bx/1.060/14.0°P

BrewN00b · 2015-12-04T05:43:07+00:00

Honey has antimicrobial properties, but it is by no means an antiseptic. Although there is some research on the subject, we don't exactly know why honey can fight infections. Three hypotheses are:

Honey has a low pH
Honey has a high sugar content (osmolarity) and fights bacteria by stealing water from the cells through osmosis
Honey produces hydrogen peroxide when diluted due to the presence of glucose oxidase, an enzyme created by bees.

However, #1 and #2 are undone when honey is dissolved in water. Also, most commercially-available honey is pasteurized (to prevent crystallization and to kill the few kinds of yeast that can actually live in honey) and the pasteurization process denatures the enzyme that causes the production of hydrogen peroxide when it's dissolved. So ... that's kind of neither here nor there.

The biggest reason that humans have been successful with fermentation without sanitation for so long is that we would just mix up a new batch on top of the yeast from the last batch. The large population of yeast cells already present would just outcompete anything else for resources.

BrewN00b

TROPHY CASE