Hot answers tagged first-time-brewer
7
It sounds like you had a very active fermentation. It is not uncommon for the majority of fermentation to be complete in a few days. Commercial breweries strive for this. HOWEVER, this does not mean that the yeast are done with your beer! Even after fermentation is complete, the yeast will clean up after themselves, reducing things like diacetyl. (which ...
7
I would get hold of another sachet of yeast as a backup. If you have a local homebrew store, almost any type of yeast will work for this kit, but I'd recommend Safale US-05 if you can get that, since that will give you a cleaner profile. If they have liquid yeasts, then Wyeast 1056 or White Labs WLP001 will produce equivalent results. Once you've got hold of ...
6
Your process sounds fine - it's the way you're using the hydrometer that's the problem.
To estimate alcohol content, you need to take a reading at the start of fermentation. You cannot read the alcohol content from the hydrometer alcohol scale at the end of fermentation.
The hydrometer cannot measure the alcohol content directly, but it can estimate how ...
6
champagne has lots of qualities that contribute to it's taste, so it could be many things, depending upon which part of the champagne taste you are detecting in your beer, but a few things jump to mind
excessive fizziness caused by over carbonation
yeast death - autolysis is usually present in small amounts in champagne, and this can occur in beer if it ...
5
Well the easy answers are this:
Light exposure - One assumes that since it's in the basement that won't be a problem.
Temperature - Not only ambient temperature, but whether or not the fermentation vessel will be on the concrete, which will leech heat.
Type of beer you brew. Lagers and saisons aren't going to get made in the basement closet. :-)
Out of ...
5
A lot of good info here, so I'll just throw in my $0.02
Your techniques when starting out will usually not be optimal. Part of this is because the instructions supplied by kits and shop owners are usually oversimplified to make the process less intimidating. That being said, you usually still wind up making beer, it may just not be the best beer :)
The ...
5
You probably just haven't waited long enough yet. Make sure the lid is on tight and wait another 24 hours. Dry yeast and the first time experience tends to take a while for things to start perking. Just be patient. Hot water can be too hot, but as long as it is under 100F you should be OK. Some of the yeast probably didn't survive the shock, but you ...
5
The basement is a good place to brew as long as the temp is constant and it is dry. However, if you have the means, I recommend finding an older refrigerator or chest freezer to use as a fermentation chamber. Connect an external thermostat and you can have a humidity controlled, temperature controlled, light-free, clean Fermentation chamber anywhere.
4
Nope, nothing wrong at all! Fermentation can happen fast, especially if you have good pitching rates and oxygenation. I've commonly had fermentations that are done after a day or two, and I'd say on average most of my fermentations are done by day 3. From a fermentation standpoint, everything is great!
However, given that the fermentation was so active ...
4
Boiling serves a few purposes in beer. Mainly it is done for the dual purpose of extracting bitterness from hops while also killing any wild yeast or bacteria that were on the brewing ingredients.
In the case of hopped malt extract, the bitterness has already been extracted for you, and the extract itself is totally sterile as its already been boiled down ...
4
Let me try to answer your questions.
1) Modern home brewers use airlocks to minimize the chance that airborne wild yeast or bacteria will populate the beer and produce undesirable characteristics. A brewer chooses a specific yeast strain for their beer because of the particular properties that that yeast strain has been cultured to impart on the beer. The ...
3
Unfortunately, you may wind up with a cloudy beer. Boiling will have "set" the natural pectin (the stuff that makes jams and jellies thick) in the raspberries. This will likely result in a beer that will never really get bright and clear. Not that I would expect an IPA to be crystal clear anyway, really.
When I have added fruit like this to a mead ...
3
If you want to add hop bitterness, you can get hold of some dry malt extract (DME) from your local homebrew store. Boil it up with some water, say a gallon, and add 1-2oz of your desired bittering hop and boil for 45 minutes. Add this to the fermenter along with your other pre-boiled wort and top-up water.
That will give you the extra hop bitterness you are ...
3
If the wort you use is pre boiled (which it sounds like it is), about your only option is to dry hop it. That will give you aroma and a bit of hop flavor, but won't increase the bitterness. Wait until fermentation is finished, then add about an oz. of hops to the fermenter. If you want to keep it British style, use something like Goldings. If you want to ...
3
Did I make a mistake somewhere?
Possible reasons for no bubbles:
a) The lead of the fermenter is not completely closed, or the airlock not perfectly attached, thus air gets out from somewhere else.
b)When you say your poured the yeast into "hot water", how hot was it? If you used water over 80-85 degrees F you could have killed your yeast.
How ...
3
I routinely ferment US-05 at 68F and it is still very clean despite others reporting in at 60F.
At 70F you'll be fine. US-05 is a great yeast and very versatile across that whole range.
In fact, unless you've already really mastered the yeast starter and the proper amount of O2 in your beer, attempting to ferment at 60F will be difficult and likely lead to ...
3
I asked a while back on adding peppers and was given a link to an excellent article on adding chillies to beer. I went with the dry hopping technique, and used chipotle peppers instead of the original plan of jalapenos or habaneros because I wanted the smokey flavor and I was not at all disappointed by the outcome. In fact, I loved it. I want to do it ...
2
You can get a pretty good estimate from a number of online programs, I prefer beer calculus. Since you're a first time brewer I assume you are using an extract kit which means you don't have to worry about mash efficiency, and the calculation should be pretty straight forward. Enter in your ingredients to estimate the initial gravity and you can measure the ...
2
That's a pretty complicated recipe for a tripel. Usually a tripel is just malt and sugar. I don't see the need for the invert sugar and/or honey in your recipe. The aromatic and Munich are also unnecessary, but there's so little of each that it probably won't hurt.
This is a very ambitious beer for your first homebrew. You need to be aware that it will ...
2
Most single temps mash go for 60 minutes.
Convention for the minutes is how long something is boiled. SO a 60min hop addition is done once your boil starts. 5 minutes means with 5 minutes remaining. 0 means right as you turn off the heat before you start to chill.
A 90 minute boil would include 30 minutes of boiling before the hop additions start.
A 90 ...
2
Since you're a first time brewer, I assume you used extract. Knowing the amount of extract, the volume and the final gravity will allow you to calculate the ABV. Dry extract (DME) has about 45 points/lb./gal. (ppg). In other words, one lb. of dry extract in one gal. of water will give you a gravity of 1.045. If you put that one lb. in 5 gal, of water, ...
2
The short answer is that the difference in IBU extraction is too small to worry about in a home brewing setting. This is the formula from 'Designing Great Beers' by Ray Daniels:
Hop utilization based on boil time:
Hop utilization based on boil time:
Less than 10 minutes: 0.06
10 to 19 minutes: 0.15
20 to 29 minutes: 0.19
30 to 44 minutes: 0.24
45 to 59 ...
2
If you think the ambient temp is getting up to 67F, then its completely likely that the beer in the bucket can get to 72F or more. Fermenting beer actually warms up from the activity of the yeast.
So its completely normal to expect a beer to ferment out in 3 days.
There are some flavor issues that come with a fast and warm ferment, but to address your ...
2
Since the closet is in the basement I would check the following:
Temperature. If your fermentor is too cold then your fermentation may never take off, or it may be sluggish and give out before the beer is fully fermented. If your fermentation is too hot, then the yeast will produce off-tasting chemicals that might make your beer taste a little bit like ...
2
You tagged with first-time-brewer... if this is true, I would caution against making an infused beer right out the gate. Fancy beers can be a tricky proposition.
That said, my best guess is that you could do an infusion similar to using vanilla, since it seems like a similar plant. See this question & answers about vanilla. There's some discussion ...
1
70F is high for US-05, and not ideal at all. However, if you beer has been fermenting for a few days, its (a) too late to do anything, and (b) risky to drop the temp anyway, since you might shock the yeast into going dormant too early.
Regarding (a), the flavors created by the yeast mostly occur within the first 3 days of fermentation, that is when temp ...
1
First things first, stop checking on the beer. Leave it be for the next 10-14 days. Resist all urges to check on it or mess with it. The bubbling will probably stop in the next day or so and this is perfectly fine. After this 10-14 day period, get the fermentor as cold as you possible can for a few day. If you can't do this, don't worry to much. This step ...
1
Temperature is the most important thing to consider. You want the ambient temperature to be about 5 to 10 degrees cooler than your target fermentation temperature (varies by style)--active fermentation increases the temperature of the fermenting wort by that much so you want to keep it cool.
In addition to the specific temperature, you want to make sure ...
1
I'm not sure that I'm contributing much here, since both other answers were so thorough, but I wanted to point out a few things.
Most importantly, whatever route you decide to take, be consistent in your methodology from batch to batch. There are quite a few formulas that have been published for calculating IBUs, and none are 100% accurate, especially ...
1
I believe you are looking for a work around not a discussion about gravity, volume and utilization rates. So here goes:
The way I work around this is to formulate my recipe as if I wasn't going to add the extract late. That way I know how much total extract I plan to use. Then I delete 80% of the extract (or whatever) and see what happens to the IBUs, ...
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