This is the third beer we have made at home. This is the second beer we have casked. As we casked this beer in conjunction with the William’s Brewing English Bitter, we ran into the same issues.
Sunday, February 5, 2012: Brewing Day
Today we are brewing a Traditional Bitter from Muntons PLC’s Connoisseurs Range. The Bitterness EBU of the malt extract is listed as 35 to 45. This kit is designed to yield 5 Imperial gallons which means we are going to get 6 US gallons.
We boiled 5 gallons of purified water in the boiler.
We used the packet of dried yeast that came with the kit. We mixed the dried yeast with about a ¼ cup of purified, room temperature water to hydrate the yeast. We left this to hydrate while we performed the brewing process.
We put the can of malt extract in hot water for several minutes to soften up the malt extract. The malt extract contains malts and hops.
Once the water in the boiler was boiled, we turned off the boiler and added the malt extract and stirred it into the water. As a note, pouring warmed malt out of a can is considerably easier then pouring it out of a plastic bag! Also, we were able to put a bit of the hot water into the can and swirl it around and dump it back into the boiler in order to get every bit of the malt within the can – something that, of course, would pretty much be impossible with a plastic bag. We brought the water back to a boil to add the other ingredients.
We added 4 ounces of Dextrin Powder (The Beverage People – AD23). This is supposed to give lower alcohol beer a more substantial mouth feel and body. It is a non-fermentable sugar. The recipe said we should add no more than 8 ounces. We only had a 4-ounce package anyway, so we chucked it all in to see how it would go.
We then added additional powdered malt extract, Brewcraft’s Briess Dry Malt – Brewers Gold Light. The recipe called for adding 1 KG (2.2 lbs) of sugar. Alternatively, we could add the same amount in powdered malt extract. We decided to go for the malt extract. We added 2 lbs 4 ½ ounces of the powdered malt extract. We then boiled it for 5 minutes.
We then connected the wort chiller to bring the wort down to below 85 degrees F. Then we emptied the boiler into the fermenter. We did this without a guiding tube so that the wort is aerated in the process. We had just shy of 5 gallons. The kit makes 5 Imperial gallons, which means it makes 6 US gallons. As such, we had to add purified water until we reached the 6-gallon mark. An interesting note about this racking session: with the use of the malt extract syrup and dried extract, there was basically no slurry whatsoever as can be seen by this photograph.
We then needed to take a hydrometer reading. This was slightly complicated by the aeration as there were lots of bubbles. We sanitized a spoon to move some of the bubbles and take the hydrometer reading in the fermenter.
The original gravity is 1.041.
We then added 1 teaspoon of water treatment and Yeast Nutrient (The Beverage People). This is to give the yeast additional nutrition on which to get going, as well as a bit more salt for the purified water (Burton salts). We then pitched the yeast we had prepared earlier, gave it a final mix and put the lid on the fermenter. We filled the airlock with a bit of vodka and secured it into place. It is now ready to do its fermentation dance.
We decided to put the fermenter upstairs since we only have one warming jacket (and another beer is using that at the moment) and the upstairs of the house is actually staying at a pretty good fermentation temperature at the moment (60-68 degrees F). The directions say 65 – 70 degrees F, so that will work well.
The instructions also say that the fermentation should be complete in 4 to 6 days, so we should be ready to put the beer into a cask at that point – at the same time we do the Mild.
Completed at 4 PM.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Casking day! We are 7 days into fermentation – which is a day longer than the instructions dictated.
We pounded in the keystone with the mallet. Then we rinsed out and sanitized the cask by filling it with water and adding 1 ounce of StarSan. We sanitized 2 spoons and 2 measuring cups and the hydrometer. We boiled a few gallons of water to have sanitized water available for rinse outs and various other activities. We used the boiled water to rinse out the sanitized cask.
We then took a hydrometer reading, which came out to 1.015.
The target for the beer is 1.008. Also, in shining a flashlight through the beer, it is clear that there is still fermentation activity going on (bubbles) inside of the liquid. As such, we have decided to let it ferment for a bit longer. We gave it a bit of a gentle stir for about a minute and then resealed the fermenter. We will take another hydrometer reading on Tuesday, February 14.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Another hydrometer reading showed 1.015 still. It appears that the beer has stopped at this point. In examining the activity within the liquid, it does appear that it has slowed down considerably from when we checked it on Sunday. We have decided to go ahead and rack it and see how it turns out. This means that the alcohol level will come out at just over 3.2%. If it turns out to be a good tasting beer, then this is an excellent result.
Tony performed the actual racking of the cask on his own again due to some other pressing chores to be done. For a more complete description of this process, please refer to the 01-29-12 English Mild (Cask) – William’s Brewing beer kits post just prior to this one.
When Tony banged in the shive, it cracked. We left it for a bit and it did appear to seal, so we’ll see how it goes.
Also, as mentioned above, this kit actually yielded 6 US gallons. As such, we poured about 5 US gallons into the cask and bottled the rest into 12-ounce bottles.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
We broached the shive by banging out the tut and then tapped the cask. It appears that this beer is a failure. As previously noted, the shive cracked when it was originally put in. We thought it had sealed sufficiently. However, the beer is a bit sour and we believe it has oxidized, which probably means that the shive did not actually seal properly. We are still going through the motions with it to see if it improves at all from conditioning, but we do not have high hopes for this one.
We put a soft spile in the shive and carried the cask up the stairs very carefully and placed it on the counter. We have put the jacket on it, but not the ice blanket yet.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Not a failure after all!!! As the beer came up to condition, the previously mentioned oxidized flavor completely dropped out of it. Additionally, the beer tasted quite pleasant, although under-conditioned. At the cask party we held today, it was actually the favored of the two casks among our guests.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
This beer improved immensely over the days following the cask party and was actually quite good (except for the under-conditioned issue). We were very pleased with how this beer turned out, especially considering the inauspicious cracking of the shive and original tasting. Much like the Mild, this beer was good until about Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week, at which point it became ullage.
The commentary below also appears in the “01-29-12 English Mild (cask) – William’s Brewing beer kits” posting. I decided to re-post this as the issue occurred in this one as well since it was casked at the same time.
Tony has had a few conversations with Paul Pendyck from UK Brewing (based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania) at this point and seems to have gotten some ideas on how to fix our under-conditioning issue. We purchased our pins from Northern Brewer. Geenmacher is the make. As it turns out, this brand is made in China and the shive hole is slightly too small for standard-sized shives. As such, when Tony hammered in the shives with the wooden mallet, he had found that they did not go in quite far enough and did not go flush with the hole. This also explains the struggles he had with the plastic shives described in the "01-29-12 English Mild (cask) - William's Brewing beer kits" posting. So, while the pins were liquid-leak proof, we highly suspect they weren’t quite air-leak proof. Of course, this would result in the under-conditioning of the beer.
Paul Pendyck had some shives that he had ordered specifically for this problem. Tony ordered some of these shives from UK Brewing. After experimenting a bit with a pressure gage, Tony believes that we have solved our problem. We will be brewing another William’s Bitter brew kit and casking it in order to do a test run on a malt extract beer we already know has turned out well in bottles to test the effectiveness of the pin with the new shives. Stay tuned.
While we had no explosion troubles with the bottles, the beer we casked did appear to be a bit lively. On April 12, Tony noticed that the shive had come up a bit from its proper lodging (as you can see in the picture). We were a bit concerned that this would spoil the beer. He used the mallet to bang the shive back into place. Luckily, this had no ill impact on the beer as it turned out well. 
The bottles of Mild turned out rather
nice, as did the cask of the Mild.
The Mild went over very well at the cask party we had on April 29,
although I think the William’s Brewing English Bitter we did was a bit more
popular -- not surprising given the Pacific Northwest's love of hops! 
