beer fountain

Ever since my first days as a homebrewer, I’ve been dreaming of trying my hand at a barley wine. Described by some as “the drink of the gods,” and capable of being aged for years, barley wine stands in the minds of many as a test of a brewer’s mettle. And with an original gravity of as much as 1.120 (or even more!), it’s about as big as beer gets.

Of course, to make a beer that big you need to start with a lot of ingredients. Malt is often doubled, and hops are too. And, in order for the yeast to have a chance to get through all that sugar before succumbing to the stupor-inducing alcohol, I’ve heard it’s best to pitch at least a pint of healthy yeast slurry in a five gallon batch.



Lucky for me, I have a yeast connection. A few months ago I had the good fortune of meeting the Brewmaster of my local brewery, Aloha Beer Company, and when I mentioned my dreams of making a barley wine, he offered to give me as much yeast as I could carry. I ended up walking out of there with two quarts—definitely more than I needed, but that’s the size of the container I’d brought, and he filled it almost to the brim.

It was lively yeast too, coming straight from a twenty barrel vat, raring to get back to work. In the few minutes I stood there chatting with the Brewmaster, the yeast swelled to fill the container. A few minutes more and the sides of my plastic container had begun to bend outward from the pressure.

I hurried to my car, put the yeast on the floor in front of the passenger seat, and turned the AC up full blast. For the whole ride home I was on edge, wincing at every bump in the road, afraid the yeast would go off like a bomb.

In the end I made it home in time, and got the yeast in the fridge without incident. Little did I know, “incident” was just taking a rain check.



Next day’s brew went fine. I started with ten pounds of Maris Otter grain in the mash, boiled the wort for an hour, adding four ounces of hops during that time. And then I took the kettle off the burner, mixed in four pounds of pale malt extract and three pounds of honey, and brought it back to a boil for thirty more minutes. I wound up with about four and a half gallons with an original gravity of 1.095—not as high as I wanted, but still within style guidelines.

Once the wort had cooled, I pitched the yeast. I wasn’t crazy enough to add all of it, so I split the difference and only threw in half. If a pint was good, I reasoned, then a quart would be twice as good.

And here’s where things went wrong. In all of my research about barley wines, I’d somehow failed to take in the importance of a blowoff tube. I figured a six and a half gallon carboy and an airlock would be good enough. Turns out it wasn’t. Not even close.

About two hours after pitching the yeast, my girlfriend and I heard a percussive sound, sort of a mix between a pop and a thud. “What was that?” she asked. I was afraid I knew.

I ran to the door to the basement, where I’d put the beer. It sounded like it was raining in there. I pulled the latches back quickly, and threw the door open.

The top of the airlock had blown off, and my carboy had turned into a beer fountain. A mighty stream of liquid shot straight up, to splatter against the ceiling, and then rain down on everything else.



I was able to jerry-rig a blow-off tube pretty quickly—amazing how fast you can make something when you’re supplied with the proper motivation—and I ended up saving about three and a half gallons of the beer. While it’s true I ended up losing almost a quarter of the batch, and several hours time spent cleaning up the mess, I gained something from the experience, too: a name for my barley wine, Kīlauea.

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.

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!