Started brewing an IPA following this recipe, from beermaking.ca. This is my second beer. The first being a beer in a box mix for an Amber Ale. It came out okay, not a huge fan to be honest but it was a good experience. This one is a tad more complicated, with boiling and hops addition in the process.
(the bold notes below are things I did "wrong" that I wanted to keep as a reminder so next time I did them correctly..)
-Boiled water on my crappy stove top, which ended up taking pretty much 45 minutes before I got a nice rolling boil because of the fact that it's one of those encased glass top so the stock pot wasn't quite tight with the surface.
-Took the kettle off the iron.
-Poured in the malt but put it back on the stove before mixing it nicely. So, I basically ended up with a bit of the malt sugar burning at the bottom. While trying to scrape it off with the plastic spoon, that ended up melting a bit. Gotta be careful with this next time.
-Stirred on occasion, waiting for it to get to a boil.
-Followed packet instructions in re hydrating the yeast but I don't think the water was warm enough.
-When the malt and water was boiling, I added the first hops... only to realize a couple minutes later I forgot to take half a cup of the wort out to mix in with the yeast to get it started.
-So, did that while trying not to take in any of the hops.
-Added it to the jar that had to yeast being re hydrated. Which was probably a mistake because of how hot it was and shortly thereafter, I thought maybe I had killed the yeast. Added cold water to get it to instructed temperature. Covered and let it sit, waiting for it to start foaming.
-About 45 minutes into the boil, I went a started running a cold water bath to cool the kettle into.
-56 minutes after adding the original hops, added the finishing hops. Let that boil for 3 and a half minutes then took it off the stove top.
-Brought the kettle into the bath tub, put the lid on and put some ice on there.
-While taking the temperature, as I was removing the lid, some of the melted ice water fell into the kettle. Hopefully there is no contamination...
-Once the temperature was around the 40C mark, transferred the wort to the primary fermenter bucket, through a grill that I used as filter to try to keep as much of the hops out of the fermenter as possible.
-Added cool water to the 23ltr mark, which brought the temperature down to around 30C.
-Added the yeast starter, which hadn't foamed up quite as much as I was thinking/hoping it would but closed up and decided to see how well it would do.
-One thing I forgot to do is take the Original Gravity of the beer. So no way for me to know the actual alcohol content of the beer in the end. I'll just have to guess on what the OG should have been from the recipe..
Couple days later, the fermentation seems to be going well. The airlock has been bubbling steadily. It should all be done by tomorrow and I should be transferring to the secondary fermenter, the carboy.
UPDATE
So, didn't quite get around to posting a follow-up to this beer so I'm just going to do that briefly now. Transfer to carboy went well. Added pellets and waited 2 weeks before transferring back to bucket to bottle. Bottled it all up and and waited another 2 weeks before tasting it.
The beer wasn't a great success. Hoppy but had a similar aftertaste that I wasn't too found of. I don't think anything went wrong though. Contamination or otherwise, but I didn't get it tested by anyone with enough beer making knowledge to know whether I fucked up or not. My guess is that the taste is due to using malt extract and hops only. Next time, I will be using grains. Either go all grain if I get around to buying the equipment needed, or do an extract plus specialty grain brew.
Anyways, that said, the beer is still fairly good and drinkable.
No comments:
Post a Comment