bottle grenades!

A few weeks back I mentioned I'd had a bottle explode. It was a bottle of my Lilikoi Amber, and in 35+ batches this was the first time I'd had it happen. Well, now I've had it happen a second time, and with a different beer. One of the last remaining bottles of my Palolo Gold, which I brewed back in January, exploded. I didn't actually hear it happen, but I was snooping around in the basement, and I saw the evidence (shown in the picture above).

I put the rest of the Palolo Gold bottles in the fridge. I've been drinking them since the busted bottle, and they pour fine, with no sign of the gushing that started happening with the Lilikoi Ambers. So why did this bottle bust?

My thought is that it's a combination of time, temperature, and bottles. Seven months is a pretty long time for a beer to sit in bottles, unless it's a low-carbonation beer like a Barley Wine, and the temperature in the cellar is warm enough to promote vigorous fermentation. So pressure must have just kept building in that particular bottle. Why haven't other bottles exploded, and why don't the other bottles of Palolo Gold gush when I open them? Maybe that particular bottle got more than its fair share of priming sugar, and maybe the bottle itself was somehow flawed.

Which brings up another important point: both of the bottles I've had bust were re-used Kona Brewing bottles. I've noticed that Kona Brewing has changed their bottles recently, and I don't if the change relates to defects with the bottles, but I suppose it's possible.

making sidra

Back in May I attended the Big Brew Day event held by local brewclub HOPS (Homebrewers on Pacific Shores). I met a bunch of people there, and drank a bunch of homebrew. One of the drinks that stood out to me was a home-made cider. I can't remember the name of the guy who did it, but he confided that it was the easiest thing he's ever brewed: just buy a bunch of unfiltered, unpasteurized apple juice and throw it in a carboy with some yeast. I decided I wanted to give it a try.

And so I have. I went down the local, organic grocery store and bought four one-gallon jugs of Mrs. Gooch's cider. Cost me about $35 bucks. Then I went to the brew store and bought a packet of dry champagne yeast for $1.75. I poured the juice in a sanitized carboy, pitched the yeast, and stuck an airlock on top. Two weeks later I primed it with 2/5 a cup of brown sugar and put it in bottles. I started drinking it the next day.

At this point the cider has been in bottles for less than a week. I'm not sure how it'll change, but right now it really reminds me of the "sidra" you get in the Asturias region of northern Spain. (The picture above shows me pouring sidra in the traditional manner, in which you try to maximize the fall to force air into the drink.) It's lightly carbonated, just enough to give a certain sharpness to the drink (cider never really forms a head like beer because apple juice doesn't have the same proteins found in grain, its carbonation is more like soda). It tastes mostly like apple juice, with a hint of champagne. And it's deceptively strong--about 7.5%, but you end up drinking it faster than beer, and you might be two bottles in before it starts to hit).

All in all, it's a decent drink. Try it!

(Here's another picture, showing a guy wearing traditional Asturian clothes, pouring cider in the traditional way--though it looks like he's missing the glass more than hitting it.)

swamp-cooling a carboy

Hawaii has two main seasons, winter and summer. They aren't as drastically different as seasons on the mainland, but they're distinct nonetheless: winter is rainier, with more clouds in the sky; and summer is drier, with clearer skies and slightly hotter temperatures. After an unusually long and wet winter here on O'ahu, we're finally moving into summer. And that means that the temperature of the basement where I've been fermenting and storing my beer has moved from "barely cool enough" (72 degrees Fahrenheit) to "really just too hot" (75 degrees) for the English and Irish styles I prefer.

The reason I'm using the basement for fermenting is because it's the absolute coolest part of the house. There's nowhere else on this property that's cooler, so I can't just move my beer somewhere else. That means I've got to find some way of beating the heat.

I've mentioned in past posts that I'm not a real gadget-oriented person--I generally prefer to try to do more with less. I'm also famously cheap. For both of those reasons, I didn't want to go the route of buying a refrigeration unit just to be able to keep brewing--though I know there are plenty of homebrewers in Hawaii who eventually do just that. What I've settled on, instead, is a swamp cooler.

A swamp cooler is, basically, a system set up to lower temperatures through evaporation. You can probably find plenty of info on the scientific principles by doing an internet search, so I'm not gonna bother to go too far into it here. All I really needed to know is that when water (or other liquids, I guess) evaporates, it reduces the temperature in the immediate area. That's why we sweat--it cools us down.

So, to keep my carboys cooler, I've started using a very basic swamp-cooler. I found a basin wide enough to fit a carboy into (my cheapskate nature was pleased to be able to find one on the property, instead of having to buy one), and then I set the carboy inside. Next I wrapped a towel around the carboy, and poured water over the towel. I filled the basin with a reasonable amount of water to continue to supply the towel with moisture--it draws the liquid up through its fibers in another scientific process I'm not gonna bother to explain--and that's it.

The temperature in the basement is currently getting to about 75 degrees Fahrenheit during the heat of the day. But the swamp-cooler keeps the carboy at around 70 degrees. Easy, simple, cheap, and good enough for now. If the temperature rises significantly, I'll have to find some other way of dealing with it. But for now I'm pretty pleased with this solution.

gushers!

It's been a little while since I last posted on this blog. I've been sort of busy. First of all, I released my first novel, which I mentioned in the last post. Secondly, I got married.

But now I'm back. I've been brewing, and doing brewing-related things, throughout this month-plus gap in posts, and I plan on trying to catch this blog up with at least some of that stuff. I've also been dreaming up some new brewing projects, and I plan on writing about them here, too. So, hopefully I'll manage to be a little more regular with updates on this blog in the next few months (or at least until something else distracts me).

I figured I'd start by catching any readers up with the newest news on my Lilikoi Amber. I've written about lilikoi on this blog before, both how to grow it and how to brew with it. I've also mentioned that my Lilikoi Amber turned out to be such a lovely beer that I decided to enter it in the Sam Adam's Longshot Contest. Well, now I've got something new to report.

Every bottle of Lilikoi Amber has turned into a gusher. I pry off the top, and the beer just foams for days. You can see a picture of this up above.

This wasn't an issue during the first few months of drinking the beer. I brewed the Lilikoi Amber back in March, and it was a delight throughout April and May. But a few weeks into June I had a bottle explode, which has never happened to me with any of the beers in the 35+ batches I'd brewed before this. I tried opening another bottle that had been sitting in the basement, and it gushed foam vigorously. Fearing that all of the bottles had built up a dangerous level of carbonation, and worried I'd have more exploding bottles if I didn't act, I put all of the remaining bottles of Lilikoi Amber in the fridge--to force the yeast into dormancy and prevent any additional carbonation-pressure. I've been trying to drink through them quickly since then, but the gushing just keeps getting more pronounced. The beer still tastes great, but I only end up with a few ounces from each bottle, and those ounces have a good amount of suspended yeast.

Why is this happening? When I transferred the beer to secondary--which is when I added the lilikoi juice--the yeast seemed to have already done its thing (converted all the fermentable sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide). It didn't really bubble at all for the next two weeks. And so I bottled, thinking all was kosher. And now they're gushers. Why?

Here's my theory: despite its tartness, lilikoi juice has sugar in it. Because of it's tartness, it took the yeast an adjustment period before it could start fermenting that sugar. So, despite the fact that the secondary carboy didn't bubble, the yeast was still adapting to the new sugar, and it finally roused itself after I'd already put it in the bottle. It got used to the lilikoi sugar, and started to consume it.

This is important for anyone who wants to brew with lilikoi: expect a delay before a secondary fermentation period. If you're going to try adding lilikoi juice to secondary, like I did, don't bottle it until the gravity drops back down to near where it was before you added the lilikoi. It might take more than two weeks.

Of course, knowing this now doesn't help my chances for the Longshot competition, and I figure my beer doesn't have a chance if it gushes like a volcano when they open the bottle. (It is sort of a funny image, though--judges gathered around a table, numerous samples scattered in front of them... they crack a bottle labeled LA and all of a sudden the whole table gets flooded with foam!) Oh well, live and learn.

I've got another crop of lilikoi fruit on the vine now, and am thinking about brewing this beer again soon. I'll be sure to take what I've learned into account for that beer!