Saturday, January 28, 2012
Tony started experimenting with the cask using water.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
We are brewing a William’s Brewery malt extract English Mild
today. This beer will be the first
beer that we cask.
We used the Wyeast packet of 1028 London Ale (mfg date:
12/06/11) that came in the packet.
We smacked the pack at around 1:45 PM. We also put the bag of malt extract into lukewarm water to
soften it up before we put it into the boiler. We had an issue with this the last time as it was somewhat
difficult to get the extract to come out when it was at basement temperature.We boiled 4 gallons of purified water (we purified 5 gallons
of water last week and stored it sealed in preparation for the brewing as our
water purifier can only purify so much at a time.) Water was boiling by 2:12 PM. Wort was added at about 2:15 pm. While it was easier to pour it out warm, these plastic bags
are not ideal for pouring out malt.
Malt was brought back up to a boil and boiled for 5
minutes. Bittering hops were added
at 2:36 PM.
Aromatic hops were added 5 minutes before the end of the
boil. Once we finished the boil,
we washed the wort chiller and put it in the wort, connecting one end to the
faucet and securing the other end into the sink. We brought the temperature of the wort down below 85 degrees
F. We started the wort chiller at
3:41 PM. The wort dropped to 84.9
degrees F at 3:59 PM. It took 18
minutes.
We transferred the wort from the boiler to the fermenter,
this time without a guiding tube and stirring it vigorously in order to
properly aerate it. Then we poured
in boiled and cooled water to bring it up to 5 gallons.We pitched the yeast at 4:12 PM. We gave the beer a final vigorous stir and secured the lid
onto the fermenter. We then moved
the fermenter into the basement, put it on top of another bucket, installed the
airlock and filled 1/3 of the way up with vodka, and put the heating jacket on
the fermenter. We realized at this
point that we forgot to get the Initial Gravity, so we reopened the fermenter
and took the hydrometer reading.
Then we resealed the lid and let it do its business.
Initial gravity: 1.038
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Casking day!
Tony casked the beer on his own today. The following are Tony’s notes on what he did.
As the batch of beer was 5 US gallons it was exactly the
right volume to fill a pin with an appropriate breathing space. (A pin has a
capacity of 4.5 UK gallons – 5.4 US gallons).
The beer in the fermenter was confirmed to be quiet and a
sample of about 1/3 of a cup was taken from the tap in order to provide a rinse
for the nozzle and for testing.
Final gravity was not taken, however, it was expected to be
in the range of 1.018.
The sample tasted remarkably good with nice clarity. It was
free of yeastiness in the taste and had a surprising level of body and
complexity considering it was a green beer straight out of the fermenter.
I installed a plastic keystone to the pin and filled the pin
fully to the shive hole with hot water and sanitizer. I let it stand for about
10 minutes, then I rinsed the pin with pre-boiled hot water.
The pin was placed adjacent to the fermenter and allowed to
cool down. I cut a short length of plastic tube and sanitized it and fitted it
to the fermenter tap with the other end entering the shive hole of the pin.
Then I added 1 tsp of Isinglass finings to about 1/3 of a
cup of cool pre-boiled water in a sanitized measuring cup. I stirred the
Isinglass solution to an even consistency.Then I added 3 oz of the Williams priming sugar to just
under ½ cup of hot pre-boiled water in a sanitized measuring jug. I stirred
until all sugar was dissolved.
I then opened the fermenter tap fully to rack the beer into
the pin. During racking, the priming sugar solution was added. When the beer
had outflowed down to the level of the tap in the fermenter the fermenter was
carefully stooped to extract the remaining beer. Racking was concluded at the
point where yeast sediment could be seen to be approaching the tap within the
fermenter.
Finings solution was then added to the pin.Experimenting with the other pin it was found difficult to
install a plastic shive satisfactorily. Therefore a wooden shive was installed
to the pin. Pin was then shaken quite vigorously. Some fobbing/leakage was
noticed around the shive. I left the pin alone for 10 minutes and shook and
rolled over again. No leakage noted as shive had apparently swollen naturally
and sealed successfully.
Pin placed on stillage in guest bedroom to undergo secondary
fermentation at room temperature.
Saturday, February 25, 2012, 3:30 pm
We broached the shive by banging out the tut and tapped the
cask. Very little CO2 seemed to
come out. Tony was a bit
disappointed by this. The beer
tasted fairly good and there does appear to be a slight bit of conditioning on
it, but perhaps less than we would like.
We’ll see how the conditioning goes.
We put a soft spile in the shive and carried if very
carefully upstairs. We placed it
on the floor for dispense from the beer engine. We will probably be serving this one at the party
tomorrow. We have put the jacket
on it but not the ice blanket just yet.
Sunday, February 26th, 2012
We tasted a bit the previous evening and again this
morning. The beer’s flavor is
gradually improving and we are anticipating for this to be a decent beer. The beer is under-conditioned and we will
have to look into this.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
The beer went over very well with the guests at the
party. We continued to have pints
of it until about Wednesday after the party. The beer continued to improve quite a bit over the next day
or two after the party. After
that, it did start to go south a bit.
Given this experience, for the next party, we plan to broach the shive
two days before the party as it appears this amount of time gives the best
result for the readiness of the beer.
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 above. 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.
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