Yeast Gone Wild!

A week ago, you may remember, I started my first batch of home brew. The first morning after the brew went into the fermenter, it formed some wierd globs of white in the browninsh liquid. The second day, it was swirling and blowing gas through the airlock at a healthy rate. The third day, it was still swirling, but the gas had slowed down.

It also had a foam on top, and a white sediment on the bottom. After about five days, the foam had broken down, and only a few bubbles remained on the surface. The bubbling slowed to about every fifteen seconds by Friday, so I decided to transfer it to the secondary bottle to settle for a few days more.

The transfer was easy. An easy pump siphon got the brew out of the old bottle, into the new. I managed to leave almost all of the sediment behind. When in the new bottle, I stoppered it and put it away to sit in the closet. It is a pretty coffee-colored liquid, with very few bubbles on top and no sediment that I can see. It bubbled quite a bit through the airlock for a couple of days, but has mostly stopped. It is now waiting another week to be bottled.

After I finished the transfer, I started a brand new batch. This one I did without a co-pilot. I cleaned the equipment meticulously. I then heated three gallons of water to nearly boiling, and cut the heat off while throwing in a gauze sack full of grain. This sat in the water and soaked for 30 minutes, and I removed it. While plling it out of the water, I poured some more water through it to rinse out any extra flavors. This is called sparging, the verb being to sparge, which is a brewer's term for rinse the grain with water.

I'm learning a whole new vocabulary: wort, mash, sparge, carboy. I am also using some other words which I already know: ferment, siphon, steep, and a few choice words that I can't repeat in mixed company. Actually, I haven't had any problems that would make me swear. It is really fun, though very time-consuming.

But, back to my story. At the end of steeping and sparging, I dumped the bucket of malt syrup in there, added an ounce of hops, and boiled the heck out of it for forty-five minutes. I added Irish moss, and more hops. After a total of 55 minutes boiling, I cooled the liquid to 85 degrees F. Once cooled, it went into the first bottle. I added the yeast at the end, a process called pitching. You pitch the yeast. I'm not sure what the use of the word pitch derives from, whether it is from pitch as in to throw , or as in to rock, as a ship pitches and rolls.

Then, I moved the bottle to the closet. I left it alone and went to bed, as it had gotten pretty late by the time I finished. The next morning, I checked on it, and was terribly disappointed to find out that it wasn't doing anything at all. I thought that I might have to pour it out and start over. It was Saturday, so I went out to do my day's errands, and returned after dark. The bottle was showing quite bit of activity. The bubbles were coming, and it was starting to move. I was relieved, to say the least. On Sunday, the brew was swirling like crazy, and the bubbles were coming through the airlock at a surprising rate. It was bubbling nearly at one second intervals.

The first brew had started up quite quickly. The first brew was an amber ale, and the second is a brown ale. The difference between the first and the second is more than the fact that the recipe of the second called for sparging, and that the brown ale used a larger quantity of grain. These factors probably account for some of the darkness of the ale. The yeasts were also different. The amber use a warmer-temperature yeast then the brown, so it went to work faster from the warmer liquid.

The two botttles are sitting in the closet, as I debate whether to start a third batch next weekend. So far, I am thinking of bottling the amber ale on Friday, and thransferring the brown ale on Sunday. Then, I think I will start a third batch, this time a pale ale. Not bad for a beginner, just hoping that the stuff turns out. It's two weeks in the bottle before I can even find out.