Guero rack to secondary

The Belgian wheat ale has been dubbed "Guero".

Yesterday, Mo and I racked it to secondary. FG was 1018, so AA is 59% and ABV is 3.5%, a little lower than I would have expected, but importantly this beer already tastes great. The stringent bitter note in the wort has mellowed nicely, and there is no residual sweetness, so I don't think we got a stuck fermentation. I think after a week or two in the secondary, and bottle carbonation, this one will be really good. The colour is a nice copper brown, and about as much hazyness as to be expected with a wheat beer.

After racking, there was a good deal of yeast sludge at the bottom of the carboy, which I decided to try to harvest. We drained out as much remaining beer as possible, then poured in a cup or so of water, then funnelled the resulting suspension into a bottle. The bottle was put in the fridge. I might try making a starter with this one.

Mo wanted to put the hefeweizen into secondary, but when we got to his house, we found it was still producing several bubbles/minute. We decided to wait a few more days before racking.

Belgian White and Wort Chiller

Yesterday Mo and I started the Belgian White at my house.

Ingredients:

4lb can Edme wheat hopped extract kit (with yeast sachet)
3lb bag wheat (60% wheat, 40% barley) extract
Orange peel from 2 oranges
Corriander

We did a split 15 minute boil - 3 gallons in Jeremy's pot and 2 gallons in my stock pot. At the end of the boil, the orange and corriander were infused in the smaller pot.

We built a wort chiller and used it for the first time. 20ft of 0.25 inch ID copper tubing, with plastic hoses, one end connected to the cold tap, the other going emptying into a bucket. This device worked very well indeed, cooling the wort in less than 30 minutes, instead of 4 hours. The warm output water was put in the washing machine!

We aerated by pouring between the big pot and a bucket several times.

The dried yeast was rehydrated for 10 minutes, then woken up with a cup of cooled wort for 30 mins - the yeast showed it was happy by fizzing. Wort and yeast were funnelled into my 6.5 gall carboy.

Six hours later, the fermentation was already very active, with 88 bubbles/minute. The metabolisation has significantly increased the temperature of the wort - over 78degF.

Hefeweizen (Weihenstephaner clone)

Last night I helped Mo brew his German wheat beer.

We borrowed Jeremy's 5 gallon pot - this takes nearly an hour to boil on the stove.

We started by infusing grains - crystal malt I think - in a muslin bag at 65degC for 30 mins.

Then we added 2 bags (3.3Lbs each?) of wheat extract (60% wheat, 40% barley), and boiled. We added 1oz of Hallertauer hops at the beginning of the boil, another 0.5oz 30 mins in and the last 0.5 oz 50mins in (10 mins before the end).

As a precaution against overboils, Mo decocted 1 gallon into a smaller pot, and boiled that seperately. Mo steeped some orange peel and coriander in the small pot at the end of the boil.

Cooling the wort was slow. We started putting the pot in a small bucket with ice, then moved to the kitchen sink. We went to the pub and it was still too warm when we got back. Once it cooled sufficiently, we aerated by pouring the wort between the pot and the fermenter bucket several times. Then the yeast was pitched.

PNB and HLB bottling

The PNB hasn't progressed any further from 1020, but I decided to bottle it all the same. I bottled the HLB too. The HLB seems to have gone a bit sour - hopefully this will go away.

I got 40 bottles of PNB and 8 of HLB. I'll put them in cases in plastic bags in the crawl space, in case any explode.

Shepherds Pie

I just cooked the best ever Shepherds pie, improvising the recipe as I went. I know this doesn't have much to do with brewing, but I was so happy, I have to write it down. Well this recipe would go very well with a pint of ESB.

When I was cooking this, one thing I had in mind was to make this as sweet as possible without adding any sugar. Browning (hence partial caramelization) of the veggies seems to help with this. The tomatoes also help to sweeten, as well as adding body to the gravy. The tomatoes should be barely perceptable (visually and taste-wise) in the finished dish.

Ingredients:
(some of the details are a bit vague, as I was using whatever was in the fridge)

1 tbsp oil (I used cheap olive oil)
1 large sweet onion (finely diced)
5-6 stalks of celery (chopped)
4 large cloves of garlic (sliced)
4-5 carrots (chopped)
3 tomatoes (finely diced)
1 cup of water
1 Lb ground lamb (yes, this is Shepherds Pie, not Cottage Pie)
2 small stock cubes (not sure what meat these were derived from)
1 tbsp Hendersons Relish (or Worcestershire Sauce)
salt
pepper
oregano

8 potatoes (peeled and cut into 3-5 cm chunks)
0.5 cups grated Cheddar cheese (the stronger the better)
0.5 cups milk

Serves 4-6

Method:
(Again timings are guesswork)

Heat oil in stock pot.

Saute onions until translucent.

Add celery, garlic and carrots, and continue sauteing until veggies start to brown.

By this time its probably getting a bit dryed out, so add the diced tomatoes. Let the juices sizzle for about 5 minutes.

In a seperate pan, saute the lamb until cooked.

In another pan, start the potatoes boiling. They should take about 20 minutes. The are done when you stick a fork in, and the spud falls right off.

After sizzling the tomatoes in the stock pot, add enough water to rehydrate, and add salt, pepper, oregano and Hendersons Relish to taste. Add the stock cubes. Stir occasionally and keep it on a low simmer.

Once the lamb is done, tip it into the mixture. I like to put a half cup or so of water in the pan the meat was fried in, and disolve most of the brown stuff off the pan. This provides some extra flavourful stock, and helps when cleaning the pan.

Once the spuds are done, drain out the water, and put in a bit of milk, mash enough to break the spuds up, then add the cheese, and some pepper. Continue mashing, adding enough milk to get a soft, but not sloppy texture. Once all lumps are mashed out, whip air into the potato with a fork.

Put the meat/veggie sauce into a baking dish (for the quantities above, I used 2 ceramic dishes - 2.5 qt and 1.5 qt), then gently cover with the mashed potato. Try not to let the sauce push through the potato. Increase the surface area of the potato by running a fork over it.

At this stage, you can bake for 30 minutes, or until the top is browned. However, since I had 2 dishes, I put the big one in the fridge for tomorrow, and put the other one under the broiler for 5 minutes (or until nicely browned), since the rest of it is already hot.

Serve hot.

PNB re-re-pitch and shopping

After re-aerating the PNB, the are no signs of renewed activity, so I re-aerated again, then repitched again (with the bakers yeast). SG is still at 1020.

On Saturday, Mo and I went on a trip to the homebrew store to get ingredients.

I bought ingedients for a Fullers ESB clone: http://beerrecipes.org/showrecipe.cfm?recipeid=2451
I don't want to do a full mash yet, and the store didn't have M&F extra light extract syrup, so they sold me 5.5 lbs of "British Dry Extra Light Extra" (powder), which will apparently substitute for the M&F and 2-row malt. All other ingredients were correctly obtained.

Mo bought German hefeweizen ingredients, and together we bought Belgian white ingredients. We'll probably end up helping each other out with all three brews.

We ground the grains in the store.

Re-awake the PNB

After 4-5 days of moderate activity, the PNB appears to have gone back to sleep. So I did another aeration to reawaken it. I used a similar technique to before, but with an improvement. I still glugged the wort from the carboy to a bucket, but this time, I set the bucket on a counter-top, and the carboy (with funnel) on the floor, below the bucket spigot. With the spigot partially open, the wort flows very chaotically, hopefully picking up plenty of oxygen. I did 4 carboy-to-bucket-to-carboy iterations. The last iteration was probably the best - the flow from the spigot was all over the place, and probably took 20 minutes to drain the bucket.

I decided not to pitch anymore yeast - hopefully what is there will wake up. If theres no activity after a couple of days, I'll consider another pitch.

During this procedure, I took another SG measurement. It is now 1020. While this is still high, it is a great improvement. This represents 53% AA and 3.1%ABV. A target of 1015 is now looking a bit more realistic. I will bottle if we get that far. As for the taste, the distinct sour note has been replaced by a mild bitterness. This is much more drinkable.

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HLB Secondary update.

The HLB has now been in secondary for 1 week. I've opened the jar periodically to test the H2S odour. It gradually decreased, and is now not unpleasant. A couple of times when I took the lid off, I waved a lit match above the beer, the theory being that this will burn off any lingering H2S. Not sure if this had and effect +ve or -ve.

The beer has settled considerably. Watching this happen has been interesting. It various stages there has been a distinct level at which the beer is clearer above, and cloudier below. This level takes a few days to drop to the bottom. This has happened at least twice. I assume this is the settling of particles of uniform sizes as they come out of solution. I'll probably