03-18-12 - English Bitter - William's Brewing (double-batch for cask and bottle)

Sunday, March 18, 2012
Brewing Day!

Today we are brewing 2 batches (10 gallons) of William’s Brewing’s English Bitter.  We will be bottling half and casking half.

We smacked 2 Wyeast packets at about 10 AM this morning.  Both are 1028 London Ale, one with a 2/1/12 manufacturing date and the other with a 2/20/12 manufacturing date.  This means that they should both be quite fresh.  It is now about 4 PM and both packets are bulging.

We forgot to start pouring out purified water earlier.  Tony has successfully gotten five gallons of it and we will be supplementing this with three gallons from the tap.  We will also have to boil more water to top things up once we have emptied the boiler into the fermenters.

And, of course, we have filled one of the fermenters with StarSan solution and have set in everything to be sanitized (2 plastic spoons, airlock, measuring cups and spoons).

I have also put the two packets of liquid extract into the sink with some hot water to soften up the liquid so it is easier to pour into the boiler.

Tony is bringing the 8 gallons of water to a boil.

By 5:08 we have successfully added both packets of malt to the boiled water and are bringing the water back up to a boil.  A note: I’m not sure if the boiler really is 10 full gallons although it says it is.  Maybe we do actually have 2 gallons worth of malt – but, of course, 2 gallons of malt and 8 gallons of water makes for 10 gallons total, so we are right on the edge and will have to watch the boil very carefully for the first bit of it.

At about 5:28 PM we were 5 minutes into the boil and we added the KCF125 flavoring hops.

I boiled about 5 gallons of extra water for the top up water once we put the wort into the fermenters.

After 50 minutes of further boiling, we added the packet of aromatic hops.

We then boiled the malt for 5 more minutes.  We then put the wort chiller in at 6:23 PM and are chilling the wort down to below 85 degrees F.

Given that we thought of the additional water a bit too late, the water was quite hot, so we used the wort chiller to cool the additional water as well.

We then put a little over 3 gallons of the beer into 2 different fermenters.  We topped up each of the fermenters to 5 gallons with the boiled and cooled water.  We then took a little bit from each fermenter to make a sample to get the Original Gravity.

We stirred around the contents of each fermenter to make sure the beer was well-aerated.

We pitched the yeast at about 7:40 PM.  We then gave the contents of each fermenter a final stir, snapped the lids on, popped the airlocks in and added the vodka to the airlocks.

We are storing the fermenters upstairs in our spare bedroom during the fermentation so that we can keep both at a constant temperature.  The house generally stays around the mid-60s degrees F. 

Original Gravity: 1.043

Tuesday, April 3, 2012, Bottling and Casking Day

16 days into fermentation

Final Gravity (bottles): 1.016

Final Gravity (cask):      1.015

Goal was 1.019 or less so this is very good and we will be bottling/casking this evening

We have sanitized 38 bottles and caps for the bottling, along with a filling tube.  We have also sanitized one of the casks, a shive, a keystone and proper tubing for that as well.  Finally, we sanitized one of the other fermenters to rack off the beer we are bottling so that we may add the priming sugar.

We boiled a whole packet of sugar in water in one pot for the beer we are going to bottle, and boiled 2/3 of the packet of sugar in another pot for the beer we are going to cask.  I also drew off a bit of beer through the tap in order to clear the tap, then poured out a ½ cup of beer in which to mix 1 teaspoon of the isinglass finings.

We banged the keystone into the cask with the mallet.

We poured the bottling beer into a priming tank, poured in the priming sugar boiled into solution, and gently stirred it into the beer.  We then attached a hose to the spigot, attached the bottle filler to the hose and filled 37 16.9-ounce bottles.  We have put the bottles in our cabinet upstairs for the first week of fermentation so that the temperature stays in the mid- to upper-60s degrees F for the initial part of the secondary fermentation.

We then brought the cask upstairs, put it on its platform and placed the shive hole directly under the spigot of the fermenter holding the cask beer.  We then attached a tube to the spigot and poured the beer into the cask.  We then added the ½ cup of beer with the isinglass finings mixed in and the priming sugar solution directly to the cask.  We then banged the shive into the shive hole.  We used a plastic shive and keystone this time.  These parts were supplied to us by UKB as a good fit for the casks we bought that had shive holes that were slightly too small for standard shives.  The shive banged in almost totally into the shive hole this time.  Tony tested it for liquid leaks by rolling the cask (which also helped mix in the priming sugar and finings).  It appeared to seal quite well (far better than the wooden ones that were the wrong size), but we decided to leave the cask on its side for about an hour just to make sure.  We checked and found that they had sealed quite well.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

We have been working our way through the bottles.  This beer turned out quite well.  It has a light, hoppy taste to it that is especially pleasant to drink with the warm weather, but with enough malt character to make the beer interesting.

At the cask party held on April 29, it did very well among our guests.  We had the cask empty of beer by Monday evening from the drinking thereof, and from me filling 2 growlers to bring to the Taproom.