The eternal Krausen

The Blue Moon Clone I brewed over the weekend still has a 2 inch Krausen on it. It first formed within 18 hours of being pitched and has been going strong ever since. You can see the little yeasties happily chugging up and down in the carboy, and it has been 6 days already!

The Smithwicks won't be finished in time for St Pats tomorrow, unfortunately. There is still airlock activity as of last night, albiet quite slow. I don't even have time to cold crash and do a super-fast carb job on it, not and do it justice. It has to be ready and able to bottle from the keg by the 23rd though, so I'm hoping it hurries up. I need at least 48 hours to crash the yeast or it will be way to cloudy for judging.

Ranger IPA A/B

Nate (coworker and fellow brewer) was kind enough to provide me with two bottles of his Ranger IPA that he brewed roughly at the same time I brewed mine. To be fair, he actually suggested the clone, although we used slightly different recipes.

I finally got around to opening one of his bottles to compare with what I have on tap. It's a rough task, I know, but I make these kind of sacrifices so you don't have to.

From here on out I'll be refering to mine as Ranger A, and Nate's as Ranger B.

To the comparison...

After the pour both produce a moderate head, very similar, and both leave nice lacing on the glass after drinking. Head retention seems to be the same, not quite disappearing but leaving a nice coating on the surface.

Ranger B on the left, Ranger A on the right. Head is very similar.

On the nose, Ranger B has a more pronounced fragrance of subtle fruitiness than Ranger A. One of the ways ours recipes differed was in the dry hop stage, I think the aroma comes down to this.

As to flavor, there is very little difference between the two, with just a bit more of a 'greener' hoppiness to Ranger B, once again I attribute it to the difference in dry hopping stage.

The major difference between the two is in clarity. This is most likely completely down to the fact that Ranger A is on tap, and has been able to settle in the keg while chilled for a good month now while Ranger B is bottled so has not had the same chance to clarify.

Ranger B on the left, Ranger A on the right. You can see the print on the piece of paper through Ranger A at this point. Ranger B has a bit of chill haze right out of the bottle, but it cleared up quite a bit once it warmed up a little. Once again, this is most likely all due to the fact that Ranger A was able to settle in the keg for a month while Ranger B did not have that conditioning.

All in all, I'm quite happy that both Rangers were so close. It was my first All Grain brew while Nate has been doing BIAB for quite a while now. I took Ranger A down to the LHBC meeting at the end of January and everyone there was favorably disposed towards the clone. I was still being asked for samples after I had already ran out of the samples that I brought down.

Ranger Danger in the Kegger

Took the Ranger IPA clone out of the fridge from cold crashing tonight. It had a lot of hops floating on the top when I put it in, cold crashing made all of it sink. That kind of surprised me a little. I know it helps particulates to settle out, as in yeasts, and other small size matter. But the whole leafs that were floating on top were also affected.

Tested the gravity as well.
OG: 1.059
FG: 1.005
ABV 7.2%

Tasted very very good even though it was not carbed yet. Looking forward to this one very much as it was the first AG brew I finished.

One of my brewing friends will be over this weekend, but I don't think this one will be quite ready by then, although sampling will be done with gusto!

Failure

The Dunkle has gone down the drain.

This is not the first beer that I have dumped. I brewed the Dunkle back before Thanksgiving. OG measured out at 1.058, which was right on target. After the first week, Krausen had fallen, things were looking good and I took my first gravity reading. It was a disappointing 1.024 when my target was 1.013. I gave it another week and checked the gravity again, it was still 1.024. It hadn't budged a single point in a week.

Thanksgiving came, and I went out of town for the holiday. I figured that I could give the beer another week or two with no problems at all, I still had a couple on tap, plus more to keg while it sorted itself out. It never did drop below 1.024, so all of the following has a big question in my mind on whether or not it was due to the gravity stall. I figured I'd go with it regardless when a keg opened up.

I left it alone after the second gravity reading was showing no movement and bypassed it in kegging order with the Black IPA (which is still tasty). Once the English Pale was finished right around Christmas I had an open tap to fill so I pulled out the Dunkle.

From the get go I thought I might possibly have an issue. I should have taken a picture, but unfortunately I didn't. Most of the time with long fermentation times, and this one was going on 6 weeks in primary, you have a nice clean looking beer. This particular one looked like it might have had some residual CO2 bubbles still on the surface, not much at all really. I cold crashed it for a few days as I normally do before I keg anything.

Once I pulled it out of the fridge to transfer it to a keg I got a closer look. The only way I can describe it was that it appeared to have very tiny (about 1 mm across at the largest) white spheres on the surface. It was by no means pervasive, maybe several dozen or so and like I said, tiny looking. In 5 gallons of beer, not really very much at all. As I was transferring to the keg, I noticed a few dozen more along the sides of the carboy, and some on the surface of the racking cane. At this point I was already worried about an infection in the beer, I tasted it as well and thought that it might have 'something' off about it but it wasn't carbed yet so wasn't totally sure.

In the keg it went, and got carbed up. After a few days at high pressure I tasted it again, and I wasn't sure whether or not my paranoia was kicking in, but it just tasted a bit ..... off. Hard to describe, other than a bit of a chemically taste to it. This is one of the reasons I want to train as a judge, so that I can tell exactly what is going on, even in a bad beer.

I kept it on tap for a while to see if it would mellow with full carb. Drank a few pints of it myself, and took a growler of the Dunkle and the Black IPA to a house party on New Years Eve. Everyone loved the Black IPA, but were all 'meh' on the Dunkle. I just couldn't get over my own paranoia that it was infected with something.

I gave it another go tonight, and I thought that I had worked past the paranoia, or the flavors had mellowed and it might be alright. But....... I had also just eaten a dill pickle before tasting it. Once I cleansed my palate of the dill, I tried again, and sure enough the strange chemical taste was still there.

Down the drain it went. I know you can drink a beer that has been infected, it won't do you any harm. But I just can't keep 5 gallons of it on tap and force my way through it at the leisurely pace that I consume my beer now. I also won't force it on my wife, who is a party to all my doubts about any beer. She knows I thought it might be infected, I won't keep anything like that from her and make her a gueinea pig.

The only bad thing is, I've never made a Dunkleweise before, so I had no base of comparison on that, but I've made plenty of Hefes to know that this one wasn't quite right.

Now the Ranger Danger is cold crashing to take it's place in the keg lineup. That one I am really looking forward to as it was my first AG beer. An associate of mine pointed me to the recipe, and he has his example so that we can compare as well.

My thoughts on what could have happened? Well, I must not have been diligent enough in sanitizing my beer thief. That was the only object that went into the beer once it was in the carboy. It is the only possible source of an infection. The Black IPA was tested at the same time with the same beer thief, but it is just fine. It also went into a keg several weeks ahead of the Dunkle. If the infection that I suspect was introduced by taking sample readings, the Dunkle had more time for it to take hold.

I've checked both the Ranger Danger and the Brown Turkey that are still in carboys and neither of them exhibit the same symptoms. Neither of them have had their airlocks off of them since they were brewed and neither show any signs of infection.

Either way, I'm now going to be scrubbing the crap out of my beer thief and racking cane. I'm also going to toss out all the fluid lines I use post brew, I have plenty to spare.

It is disappointing to have to dump out nearly a full keg of beer, but I have plenty more to drink. This is also not the first infection I have had. My peach experiment got infected much worse than this one. It was very obvious with big bulbous fuzzy growth all over the peaches. That one only got away from me because that was during the week that my daughter was born and I couldn't tend to the peaches soaking in the completed beer at all (you have to keep the peaches submerged to avoid the possibility).

It is a one of those learning experiences that keeps you on your toes about disinfecting everything that may come into contact with the beer.

Live and learn.

Another question I have to deal with now. I washed and saved the yeast from that carboy, is this going to have the same infection (if thats what it was) lurking around in the yeast samples I saved. I think it might, and to assuage my paranoia I think I am going to have to dump out the yeast samples. No big deal, I'm not even really sure what yeast strain it is, it came from a Brewers Best kit from the LHBS. It won't kill me to dump them.

Choices

During the holiday weekend (which I took a break from the 'nets so no new posts here), my family visits helped with emptying out the English Pale that had been on tap since just after Thanksgiving.

Now I have to pick between 3 different ready to keg beers:

Dunkleweiss
Ranger IPA clone
Northern English Brown

The Dunkle has been in the fermentor the longest time, and I already have a Black IPA on tap...
The NEB hasn't even been checked for final gravity yet...

Dunkle it is!

Also, my lovely wife gave me a pressure cooker for Christmas, now I can sterilize jars, lids, implements, etc, for yeast washing and storing.

I'll be getting to that next, washing the yeast cakes in order to store my own like bank.

Brewing Pipeline

So I've come to a point where I have quite a bit of beer in the pipeline. When I started earlier this year I knew it would take a while before I could build up a stockpile of brewed beer given that I was drinking my product from kegs as soon as I made it.

For months I kept on a schedule, trying to get ahead of consumption. This barely kept me stocked with ready to drink beer, as it was being consumed almost as fast as I made more.

In September my wife and I gave birth to a new baby girl, this had two effects on my brewing stockpile. In the short run it interrupted my brewing schedule for a good month, and I had nothing on tap for a long time. I thought that this would set me back for months in trying to build a stockpile.

Interestingly enough though, in the long run it has increased my stockpile as my consumption has gone way down. While my wife was still off of work I was free to indulge in a pint or two a couple times a week, thus I was still managing a consumption rate that kept up with my brewing rate.

However with my wife having gone back to work now my consumption has dropped to about 4 pints a week at most, and never more than 1 a day during the work week. Most nights I do not even have one. You see, my wife works third shift, and while she is at work I am tasked with being a responsible adult. Such is the sacrifice that we make for our children.

I've had a busy brewing schedule since just before Thanksgiving, even while my consumption has plummeted. This now has me in the position I originally envisioned where I had multiple beers ready for kegging as I empty a prior tapped keg.

As of right now, I have the last of an English Pale Ale, which my wife likes alot, so I've been saving that for her (she has even fewer than myself per week), and the Black IPA on tap (which is freshly tapped). Once the English Pale is gone I will be kegging the Dunkle.

This still leaves me with the Ranger Danger IPA, and the newest Brown Turkey still in fermentors.

All told, discounting the English Pale, I have 20 gallons of beer to cycle through before I run out. At my current rate of consumption this might keep me stocked with beer through February of 2013. I may end up brewing only once more over the coming winter. Brewing outdoors in the winter is a major deterrant.

It was just a haphazard strategy that I used to get to this point, but I think that I will be attempting the same in the future. Brew a lot before winter comes, then enjoy the fruits indoors where it is warm.

Keg Setup

So if anyone was interested in seeing my bar/keg setup, here is a brief overview. This is my dual tower with the drain. The drain snakes under the bar and goes into the sink installed in the counter, the counter is out of the pictures to the left. Comes in quite handy to have the drain rather than just a drip tray.

Having two is nice for variety.

 Next up is the kegerator that sits below the bar. Notice that the air tank sits on the outside to the right. I could move this inside as well as I have room in the back of the kegerator. I have a single line for air going into the top, and the dual beer lines coming out of the top as well. The kegerator is offset to the left of the tap by about 18 inches, thats the only place I could put it due to the structural support incorporated into the bar (The maroon/red 4x4 seen just behind the CO2 tank, which can also be seen above directly behind the tower).

Inside the kegerator I can only fit the two 5 gallon corneys due to headspace in the back of the fridge being lower than the front. In the future I plan to invest in a couple of 3 gallon corneys as well and be able to keep 4 styles in the fridge, even tho I can only have two on tap. It is easy enough to use quick disconnects to swap back and forth.

Here you can see the limit of the headspace in the back (which contains the compressor for the cold plate). The CO2 line that comes in from the top is split with a T fitting in order to run two kegs at once. A much cheaper option than a dual regulator (another future purchase).

And that is my setup. It took a couple years to finish my basement, but it was all worth it.



Here is the rough finish on the bar, prior to the tower being installed in front of the support pillar. You can see the countertop with sink with the mirroed backing. Underneath the counter is where I put the fermentors, both empty and full.