Category: beer

Here is a one quart yeast starter made from one cup of light DME (dried malt extract), 1/2 teaspoon of yeast nutrient, and one Activator pouch of Wyeast 1214 Belgian Abbey yeast. After this grows for a few days I hope to use it to make a somewhat-clone of Dragonmead’s Final Absolution (BeerAdvocate review), a top-quality Tripel that’s won it’s fair share of awards. With any luck the batch I brew will be equally good, but I probably won’t know until autumn as it’s supposed to age for six months before consumption.

After snapping the neck off of my carboy I thought I was going to have to buy a new one, but as it appeared to be a clean break I decided to try fixing it instead. A bit of wet filing and sanding (while wearing heavy clothing, respirator, and safety glasses) has smoothed the neck back out and I think it’ll be just fine to use. Later today I’ll swing by Cap N Cork and pick up a larger stopper so that it can be airtight and then it’ll be ready to go, whenever the next batch of beer is due to be brewed. This also saves ~$45 and having to deal with throwing out a torso-sized broken piece of glass.

(I’m currently on track to have three kegs of beer in the kegged beer cooler in three weeks with one more carboy aging and ready to replace whatever runs out first. Long-term I hope to keep three kegs available at all times with one aging. This should allow for sufficient choice and also enough beer if there’s an unexpected party or gathering here. Of course, this presumes that all batches made are good…

(Here is a photo of the broken neck before smoothing.)

The thinner new pot and super-hot turkey burner flame resulted in a little bit of scalding on the bottom of the boil kettle from beer-making yesterday. However, it’s just a little bit, and I don’t see it causing any issues. The larger kettle with a bigger opening made boiling a lot easier. Foam-ups during hop addition cleared themselves automatically, there was practically no risk of boil-over, and I could keep the heat nicely high (and thus a harder boil) during the whole process.

After boiling and cooling the wort I also did something to save a bit of money on yeast: racking the wort right on to the trub from the previous batch of beer. Since I was making a darker and hoppier (but otherwise similar style) beer this won’t affect the flavor of it, and the extremely large quantity of yeast meant that the batch was fermenting strongly within four hours. Normally the amount of activity seen just a few hours later would take 24-36 hours to occur when pitching (pouring into the wort) the quantity of yeast in a Wyeast Activator pack. Not only did this decrease lag time while the yeast started growing, it also saves roughly $8 on yeast, the time spent cleaning out the fermenter, and is simply less wasteful overall.

As this beer (a dark IPA) is recommended to have two months of aging I’ll probably do another short-aging-time beer after this with the goal of having three full kegs of beer in the kegged beer cooler. If I can constantly keep three different (tasty) beers in there with one aging, I’ll be pretty set for variety, having friends over, and saving money overall.

Since I’ve been having boil-over problems with using a ~7 gallon pot for boiling ~6.5 gallons of liquid, I decided to purchase this Bayou Classic 36 quart (9 gallon) stainless steel pot from Amazon for future batches. This should cut down on the boilover simply by being larger volume, but I also suspect that the larger surface area will result in less concentrated foaming and again less mess.