carbonation drops

I've mentioned before that I've had trouble getting standard levels of carbonation in my bottles since moving to Hawaii. Some bottles come out flat, and others are so over-carbonated that the whole beer foams out of the bottle when you pry off the crown. One theory I've developed, as a possible reason for this irregular carbonation, is that the bottles end up with varying levels of priming sugars. Typically, I'll melt some priming sugar in with a cup or two of water, and add that to the carboy immediately before bottling. I'm wondering if the that sugar doesn't mix in evenly with the unbottled beer. Perhaps it sinks to the bottom of the carboy and then gets sucked out by the syphon, so that the first several bottles get more of the sugar than the last few bottles.

In order to test this theory, I've bottle my last two batches using carbonation drops for the priming. The way they work is you add one drop per 12 oz bottle, or two drops for a bottle 22 oz or bigger. The amount of sugar per bottle should be pretty even, using this system. And so far it seems to be playing out. I've been drinking bottles from the first batch, and so far they've all been perfectly carbonated.

The downside is that the carbonation drops end up costing around 10X more than just buying sugar and mixing it in with the whole batch. But in the end that's still just an extra 10 cents a bottle. If I can do away with one more brewing difficulty, 10 cents a bottle is worth it to me.

breaking brews into batches

I made my first cider a while back, which left me with the four 1-gallon glass jugs that the apple juice had come in. I figured the jugs would be perfect "mini-carboys," and on Sunday I got a chance to try using one in that capacity.



I was finally getting around to bottling the Belgian-yeast beer I brewed almost two months ago. I'd left that beer sitting in secondary fermentation for six weeks because I wanted to see if an extended secondary would help mellow the yeast further before bottling--I've been having trouble with bottles over-carbonating and turning into gushers. I've collected a lot of lilikoi juice in that time, and I thought it would be cool to rack some of the Belgian beer onto a few ounces of lilikoi, to see how the flavors would blend.



So, after sanitizing one of the 1-gallon jugs, and pouring three ounces of pasteurized lilikoi juice into the bottle, I added about four-fifths of a gallon of beer to the jug (I wanted to leave it with some headroom, just in case it kicks into another vigorous fermentation). Then I put a sanitized cap on the bottle and shook it up. A sanitized airlock on top, and it was all set.



It's already bubbling, and I'm eager to see how it turns out.

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.

Brewing in a Bag

After reading about it in the January/February issue of Zymurgy, I've been wanting to try the whole brew in a bag process. It seems like a remarkably easy way to handle grain mashing, and the Zymurgy article claims it's as efficient as the more traditional mash-and-sparge approach. I wanted to try it with my last beer, a Poi Wheat ale, but I didn't have a grain bag, and I wasn't sure how much additional gravity would be added by the poi. In the end I used a modified approach in which I mashed the grains in six and a half gallons of water, instead of my usual one-or-two-quarts-per-pound mash with a two-quart-per-pound sparge, and then drained it into the kettle. Grain absorption meant I had to add more water, which I ran through the grains straight from the tap. I was satisfied with the original gravity I wound up with, but my questions about brewing in a bag weren't really answered.

Since then I've acquired a grain bag big enough for an all-grain brew, and yesterday I used it for the first time. What's more, since I brewed a recipe I've brewed before, I was able to compare the conversion achieved with the brew-in-the-bag method to the conversion I achieved previously, with a separate mash and sparge. (If you want the end result, you can skip to the bottom of this post--what follows is a bit of detail about the process I used.)

In order to compensate for grain absorption, this time I started with about eight gallons of water in the kettle. I brought it to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, put my bag in the kettle, and dumped my grains straight into the bag. I mixed them around a bit, and then twisted the top of the bag in hopes of keeping the grains from sneaking over a dropped edge. And then I put the lid on the kettle and let it sit for an hour.



I should mention that I added 10.5 pounds of room-temperature grains to eight gallons of heated water, and the relatively small amount of grains meant that the mash temperature only dropped to about 160. I didn't add heat at any point in the 60 minute mash, and after an hour the temperature had dropped to 144. Those are sort of unusual mash temperatures, which probably affected the original gravity I ended up with. And it's likely that the high starting temperature resulted in a more dextrinous wort, with less fermentable sugars, which will result in a heavier-bodied beer. (I love heavy-bodied beers, but since I've moved to Hawaii I've been trying to lighten them up a bit, so my hot mash was probably a mistake.)

Anyway, after an hour I started the flame again, and immediately after that I lifted the grain bag out of the wort. I held the bag above the wort for a few minutes, wanting to let it drain more wort into the kettle. But before long I decided I'd just throw the grain bag into my old bucket fermenter, let the wort separate out there, and then open the tap to pour that wort into the kettle. (In the picture below you can see the shadow of the wort that's starting to gather at the bottom of the bucket.)



After that, it was brewing like normal.

The end result? My previous brew of the same recipe had an original gravity of 1.058. This brew, using the brew-in-the-bag approach, resulted in an original gravity of 1.055. So I lost .003 points, or around one-tenth of a percent of potential alcohol. But I also cut my total brewing time by nearly an hour and a half.

For me the time reduction and the greater simplicity make the brew-in-the-bag mash a winner. I'm planning on using the big grain bag for my next batch.

a few thoughts on bottling

Two of the homebrewers I know best, Danny of Deeper Roots and Chris of Lewy Brewing, seem to prefer kegging to bottling. I think they feel like it takes a lot less effort to put a beer in a single keg than 50 bottles, and it's probably a thrill to be able to pour a pint of your own homebrew out of a tap. I remember Danny saying, also, that getting the right level of carbonation was easier with a keg--you just set the pressure and wait a week, instead of trying to guesstimate with priming sugar amounts and conditioning time. I've never had the opportunity to keg any of my beers--and I'm not expecting to have the opportunity anytime soon--so I can't really speak to its merits from personal experience. But the main reason I haven't kegged a beer is this: I like bottling.

I like bottling for a lot of reasons. First of all, I like the fact that I don't have to buy, maintain, and store kegging equipment. I'm a cheapskate at heart, and when I can get something for free, it makes me happy. So far no one has offered me a free keg, or any of the other equipment running a keg requires, but empty bottles are easy to come by. I can usually get enough for a batch of beer just by talking to a few friends on Sunday afternoon. And bottles, when they're packed in their boxes and the boxes are stacked up, don't take all that much room to store, and don't need to be refrigerated.

Another thing I like about bottling is how low tech it is. You don't need extra tubing and valves and custom refrigerators, and a semi-permanent place to set that all up. The most esoteric piece of equipment you need is a bottle capper, and you can get one for $10 bucks and be set for life. Bottle caps and priming sugar (I usually use dried malt extract) are cheap too, and easy to come by. If you're out of priming sugar, you can always borrow a cup of table sugar from your neighbor, but chances are they won't have a tank of CO2.

Bottles themselves are a pretty beautiful thing, too. It might take a bit of work to get them ready for use the first time (stripping off the labels, and cleaning out any mold if they weren't properly cleaned when you got them), but after that initial prepping all it takes is a quick rinse right after pouring out the contents, and then a quick dip in sanitizing solution right before refilling. And you can keep using them again and again. In San Francisco I had bottles that got reused with more than 30 different batches of beer!

Since the bottles are cheap (i.e. free), there's no reason not to give them away to friends and family, which gives you an opportunity to share beers with people that don't have the time or inclination to stop by and drink from your keg. You can bring a few bottles along to parties and other places too--transporting a bottle of homebrew is way more convenient than transporting a keg and keg system.

Having mentioned some of the more practical reasons for bottling, allow me to get a bit more far out. With a keg all of your batch goes into a single place (unless you're using extra small kegs), and then you keep pulling from that same body of beer. With bottles, each individual bottle becomes its own world; the living yeast continue in their life cycle, each bottle a different colony. You get a chance to observe changes, and experience uniqueness, with every bottle. You can age them longer, age them in different conditions (cooler or warmer, or maybe stick one in sunlight to try for that Heineken effect), or even add specific things to specific bottles (like throw some raisins in one, or prime different bottles with different sugars). The possibilities are endless.

And since I'm on the topic of bottling, here's one thing I've learned just since having moved to Hawaii: the labels on Kona Brewing bottles are pretty easy to peel off, just soak the bottle for an hour or so first. (Sierra Nevada labels used to be easy to get off too, but they seem to be a bit tougher now that the label has changed).