A while back I made several batches of beer using a Mr. Beer kit that Mom gave me for Christmas. Eventually Mom made a batch and so did Jeb and one of them gave me back the keg, so now I have two kegs, but only one set of bottles. In the Spring, Mr. Beer had a sale on their cans of beer syrup and I bought four of them. Adding water and yeast and waiting for fermentation, the result is 2 gallons of beer with a 3.2% alcohol content. The ones I bought this time included “booster” which is additional sugar that adds 1% to the alcohol content and they sent two packs with each can. It doesn’t affect flavor like adding malt, just gives extra food to the yeast who generate more alcohol.
After a very hot October, the house is now cool enough to ferment beer, so I decided to do a batch this weekend. One of the cans was for a Marzen style of beer, which is German, but I thought I would still add stuff to it, including extra hops (even though Marzen isn’t that hoppy usually) and some malt. So I drove to Ale Yeah and was told they hadn’t sold homebrew stuff for 6 years (bought some beer anyway). So it has been a while since I did this. But they told me a place that is actually closer to my house and I went there and picked up 1 oz. of Mosaic hops and a pound of Golden Light dried malt extract, plus a reusable bag to put hops in since adding hops makes such a mess. So an extra $8 in ingredients and $4 for the bag plus each can plus booster was $9.
I had to go back and check out the process that had gotten the best results, which is what we did at Jeb’s house. I pretty much repeated that, but only used half of the malt since I was still adding the two booster packs (hopefully the opened pack of malt will keep) and used Mosaic instead of Wilammette hops. I boiled the malt and half of the hops for 25 minutes and added half of the hops with about 15 minutes to go. The hop bag made things a lot better and I was able to reopen it and add more hops to it partway through. The bag can be washed in the washing machine, but it is stained green now. The yeast started working right away and I am getting trub, but not that many bubbles yet. 4 weeks of fermenting puts me bottling on December 7.
I was worried the old plastic bottles I have might be too brittle to hold pressure. I took some brew out and put it in a bottle with water and priming sugar which should generate realistic pressure and it is holding so far.
All apparent activity in the barrel stopped after three days. Today, one week after brewing I poured out a little. It is very cloudy even after I threw out the first shot glass. It doesn’t taste sweet, but boozy and kind of bitter so maybe it is really done fermenting. Hopefully it will smooth out. I probably should have left one of the bags of booster out.
The bottle of fake beer that I made seemed to get full pressure and held without breaking, so I guess the plastic bottles are still okay. The resulting fake beer had pretty good carbonation, but I didn’t drink any since I didn’t really try to make it sterile. Then I cleaned out that bottle and the other seven bottles and filled them up with beer from the little brown keg. I had to tilt the barrel to fill up the last bottle. Now I wait another 4 weeks for conditioning and carbonation in the bottles.
Did you think about doing a Coke+Mentos test?
Opened a bottle today, three weeks after bottling. Has a little of the champagne taste I got on previous batches, but otherwise is good. Can’t taste much in the way of hops. It is still a little bitter and is fairly strong in terms of alcohol. I think maybe I boiled the hops too long and shouldn’t have added so much booster. The beer has a nice dark color, which is probably the marzen mix since my added malt was light. My production is limited by the bottles since I only have one batch worth of bottles. If I were to brew today, I would need to finish drinking all 8 quarts in 3-4 weeks when it would be time to bottle again. But if I get a bottle capping machine I could brew in 12 oz bottles. Certainly I could borrow a capper from someone and only buy caps. 2 gallons makes about 21 12-ounce bottles of beer.
I drank enough of the last batch that I could finish the remaining bottles in 3 weeks or less, so I decided it was time to make another batch. I wanted to do my other can of Oktoberfest mix and this time add a different hop. I went to the homebrew shop thinking I would get citrusy, tropical Citra hops, but he recommended I stick with something German, Hersbrucker, which has floral and herbal notes. He also straightened me out on dry hopping to get the aroma and flavor, saying I should throw the hops into the wort halfway through fermentation rather than cooking it. So I could have made the beer the last weekend.
I reviewed all the instructions on cleaning and felt like I did a really good job of sanitizing the fermenter and utensils. I am using filtered water thinking the filter will make for better tasting water, but also maybe risking it will pick up contamination from the filter pitcher. I put the booster in before the water got warm this time and got it dissolved fine, then added the dry malt extract slowly and brought it to a boil. I had soaked the can of beer syrup for about a half hour in warm water to get it more liquid and easier to mix in and had my sanitized spatula to get as much out of the can as possible. So that all went pretty well. Last time I made a mess pouring the hot wort into the fermenter already halfway full of cold water, and I mostly avoided that, but still got a little on the outside, but went ahead and pitched the yeast on top before decided I should clean off the the spilled wort from the outside. And as I was doing that the whole fermenter slipped out of my hands and fell in the sink, sloshing some out, but also breaking a piece off of the spigot and now the plastic fermenter was leaking! I washed my hands and arms really well and reached into the wort to tighten the spigot down, but it was still leaking. I went and got the other fermenter I had, but I hadn’t sanitized it. I thought maybe I would just swap out the spigot, but I wasn’t sure the fermenter wasn’t cracked, so I rinsed it out (didn’t have anymore sanitizer and didn’t feel like I had time anyway) and poured everything into the new fermenter and it started coming out the spigot because that was left open, but I closed that. I hadn’t really lost that much wort, but there is a big risk of bad contamination from me putting my hand in there, plus using an unsanitized fermenter. Ugh. Plus the yeast is supposed to be pitched on top, but now is all mixed in. However the yeast activates and reproduces so quickly that I’m not too worried about it. Later on I filled the old fermenter with water and couldn’t get it to stop leaking (at the spigot, but not necessarily from the spigot) so I just threw it away.
This morning there was a nice layer of foamy krausen on top, so the yeast were not deterred in their work.
After a week I didn’t see anymore bubbles so I figured it was safe to add the hops even with two weeks more to go in the fermenter (I’m thinking three weeks instead of four this time). After adding them I realized I should have put them in a bag because now there will be a ton of hop pieces. If they settle to the bottom it may be okay. Then today I decided to try the beer. I had to move the keg to get access to the tap, which disturbed everything inside and there was a lot of trash in the glass, even after throwing out the first sample. The beer seemed okay, a little sour, but no champagne taste. Maybe putting the keg in a cooler room than last time helped. Not that hoppy either but it was a small sample.
After 3 weeks of fermenting in the keg, I went ahead and bottled. I was worried the hops would end up in the bottle or clog the tap, but they had settled to the bottom along with the trub and didn’t seem to cause any problems at all. They didn’t even take room like they do when you are boiling them. I boiled my hops bag just in case I needed to use it to filter the beer, but didn’t need it. Even a coffee filter would probably allow yeast cells through for carbonation fermentation. Even after the spillage during brewing, I still had enough for eight quart bottles with not too much left over. I could smell the hops as I was cleaning out the keg, but otherwise not that apparent. 4 weeks in the bottle gets me to March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day. That won’t give me time for another batch of beer, but my two remaining cans of extract are good until September 2021.
I was checking on the bottles and they are getting pressure, but the later bottles I filled (6-8) definitely have hop residue floating around. Plus I think all of them are still cloudy. Need to use the hop bag next time. Maybe I can pour the beer from the bottles through a strainer into a glass without too much trouble.
On schedule I put one of the bottles in the fridge yesterday and tried it out last night. Not sure it was significantly more hoppy, but it wasn’t bad either. There was a little hop debris floating around when I did the second pour out of the bottle, so I tried filtering it through the hop bag into the glass and it took out most of the carbonation. Maybe just a regular strainer would be better.