I was kegging a batch of Honey Brown yesterday and I noticed this white, bubbly, film sitting on the top of the beer. It wasn’t fuzzy or hairy, and it didn’t smell like mold. But it was white and slimey. Tasting the beer after getting into the keg I didn’t taste anything really bad, but there was maybe a bit of a stale flavor. I’ll taste it again in a few days after it carbonates a bit.
This is the first I’ve ever experienced this, anybody know what it is? Here is a picture:
First off, this is my inaugural post; so let me start by introducing myself. Hi, I’m Bill. I started out brewing using the Mr. Beer kit 2-3 years ago, and while I don’t think this is a bad kit for beginners I do think that you grow out of it very quickly. I’ve made about half a dozen or so batches with that kit, most of them good (at least I was happy with them), but I’ve also had 2 batches that went bad (but in no way was this attributable to the kit).
Specifically, what went wrong with those beers is that they developed an undesired flavor that tasted like Green Apple. The first time I was making a Pale Ale, and I mistakenly thought that it was a fruity flavor imparted from the Hops that I used. The second time was with a Vanilla Porter, and by this time I realized that something wasn’t right. Some research determined that the likely culprit was a chemical called Acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is produced naturally by yeast during the process of fermentation as an intermediary step on its way to becoming ethanol (alcohol). It can also be produced as a by-product of acetic acid bacteria, but this will usually result in more of a vinegar flavor. Since my beer only had a slight green apple flavor, I think the most likely cause was that I might have pitched the yeast while the wort was too hot, or I didn’t let the beer completely ferment, or some combination of the two.
The lessons to learn are:
So, now that you are armed with this knowledge, go forth. Good luck and happy home-brewing!
Every once in a while, we get a question from the twitter universe that we don’t know the answer to. Truth is, we get an occasional question, and we often don’t know the answer. The fun part with this is it gives us a chance to find out about something we haven’t yet tried, and we add it to our list of things to do. One such question came in a couple of days ago related to wood chips, so herein lies some answers, or at least insightful comments.
For years, people have been fermenting their beer in barrels, usually oak barrels that previously contained bourbon, whiskey, or other sweet distilled liqueurs. These liqueurs impart their aroma, taste and character onto the beer. Many times, people who decide to ferment in such vessels acquire them from a distiller and recondition them, to make them water tight again. Unfortunately for the homebrewer, the cost of such barrels is usually prohibitively expensive, and quite honestly, a 55g barrel in your garage/basement/brew shed takes up a lot of space. Even if you are doing 10g batches, the container is only 1/5th full, and the fermenting gods won’t like that very much.
How then, do we get around this issue? There are a couple solutions. A quick search on the internet turned up several choices for pre-conditioned 5g barrels that run between $140 and $170, plus shipping. This would be a very nice choice for those who have the cash to spend on such a fine piece of craftsmanship. The barrel should easily last close to 10 years, which will give you many flavorful homebrews.
If a barrel isn’t your style, or you aren’t sure if a barrel is your style, there is the option of wood chips. You can use any number or types of wood, but oak seems to be quite popular. Wood chips inside your secondary fermenter can have very much the same effect as using a barrel as a secondary fermenter (You should avoid using a barrel as a primary due to lack of head space, and inability to easily see what’s going on inside). The first question is, how much? Much like hops, the wood imparts a flavor on the beer relative to its surface area. Many small piece of wood have more surface area than one large piece, thus it will be smarter to go with several smaller pieces, but how much? The first thought would probably be, “a 5g barrel weighs 20lbs, I should use 20lbs of wood chips.” This is a bad idea. A barrel’s surface area is only one side of the wood to the beer. The barrel’s weight also contains metal, and 20lbs of wood in a fermenter will fill it. Your best bet is to think of wood chips like hops. Go on the heavy side of what you would dry hop – 2-4oz.
You have your wood chips, your beer has been transferred to a secondary fermenter, and you realize, the wood chips aren’t sanitary! This is quite easily fixed. The first thing you should do is bake the wood chips in your oven for 30 minutes, or until dried out. This will ensure that they are sanitary, but will also get rid of much of the flavor. The next step is to soak the wood chips in your favorite liquor for a day (this doesn’t need to be done every time, but definitely the first time). I prefer a bourbon or whiskey – don’t go too cheap. The next step is simply to be patient. Your beer will slowly take on the taste of the wood chips in the secondary fermenter. When you rack your beer to the keg (or bottle), save the wood chips. You can reuse them if you bake them and store them in an airtight container. Soak them in water to rehydrate them before using them in another beer (or throw them in another beer right away).
At this point, if all goes well, you should have the knowledge to create an oak fermented style of beer, with or without an actual barrel. This is definitely something we’re likely to try with a winter warmer, because, quite frankly, a little bit of bourbon flavor in a nice homebrew is the perfect way to spend a cold February afternoon.
This weekend was a very busy one for brewing. In 30 hours, we brewed 3 separate 5 gallon batches of beer and it’s ilk. Saturday morning we made a hard cider and Saturday we made a Christmas beer and a Hefeweisen. We also receiver our new wort chiller on Friday and experimented with that quite a bit.
The cider was pretty easy to make, and we are very much looking forward to the results in several weeks. We started off by picking up 7 gallons of freshly pressed cider from Shutts Cider Mill in Webster, NY. This cider is pasteurized, but that’s ok because we are going to boil the cider anyway. It is important that your cider does not contain any preservatives. If it does, it will prevent the yeast from doing their thing. What was most remarkable about this cider was its clarity. It looked more like apple juice than apple cider. The 7 gallons of cider was boiled and reduced down to 5 gallons to increase the apple flavor and increase the amount of fermentable sugars. If you are just using standard ale yeast, this step is not required, but will result in a sweeter finished product. For this adventure though we decided to use champagne yeast. This will make an extremely dry cider, but the carbonation should help offset some of that dryness.
A word about the wort chiller: This thing is a heavy little piece of metal. Currently we are gravity feeding from the brew kettle, to the wort chiller and into the carboy. It took us a little while to get the hang of this, as the wort would happily flow from the kettle to the chiller, but would trickle out of the wort chiller into the carboy. The top of the carboy was below the bottom of the brew kettle, and the wort chiller was on the ground. Gravity should have been all that we needed to get a good flow into the carboy, but it wasn’t. In order to get good flow, we had to let the wort chiller fill up, and then lift the wort chiller above the top of the carboy. This created a nice siphon and we were off to the races. We chilled 5 gallons of wort from 210°F to 68°F in 5 minutes. The other really important thing was to keep the hose from the kettle to the wort chiller as short as possible with no superfluous dips. By the time we got around to the Hefe on Sunday afternoon, we were pros with this thing.
A bunch has happened since the Autumn Festival of Ales, with regards to beer, and we’ll have some more detailed posts on a couple of the events… eventually. James managed to brew his first beer ever, with just a little guidance from Bill, Travis and myself. Everything went quite well, and it appears to be fermenting nicely now.
Broadway Ale Fermenting
Since Saturday was definitely a beer day, with the festival and all, we decided to rack the pumpkin ale from the primary fermenter to the secondary. I’m glad we did, because the pumpkin additive (and brown sugar) made it ferment like crazy, and the yeast were actually smelling pretty bad. The beer itself smelled good though, and the secondary fermenter should help to ensure it stays that way. The pumpkin ale is a nice, deep red color, and is better than I’d expect from a pumpkin. Can’t wait to try it. It will be ready for Halloween! The original gravity measured a little low though, so it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out.
Also of note, and something we’ll be covering more later is force carbonation. We have, for quite some time been kegging our beer, but once it’s in the corny keg, we shake it up for 30 seconds and let it sit for 3-4 days. I personally think that it takes 4 days to get good carbonation, though many people say 3, when using the ‘patient’ method. The part that intrigues me is the theory that it is possible to force carbonate in as little as 4 hours. I’m not sure it gives a good flavor to the beer, as a lot of the carbonation process is also letting it sit and come into its own. We will be doing some experiments over the next couple of beer to figure out, is it really possible to do a 1 day carbonation and still have it taste good. Stay tuned!
We currently have 2 beers fermenting. We don’t have any pictures of them brewing, which is silly, seeing how they were both relatively original recipes.
The Livonian IPA is a very original recipe, brewed with hopes grown in Livonia, NY (South Livonia, really, but who’s keeping track), by a good friend of ours. We ended up creating an IPA with 6 1/2 oz of whole leaf Cascade and Willamete hops. That one is currently sitting in the secondary fermenter, waiting to be kegged. I’m not sure if it will be what I wanted though, as the original gravity was a little low.
The 2nd one we currently have fermenting is the pumpkin ale. That one also had a low original gravity, but spent the first 3-4 days of fermenting going nuts (we ended up having to put a blow off on it). It looks good now, though it’ll be a week or 2 before get around to kegging it. Hopefully in time for the Halloween party, though we need to finish up the Honey Amber first.
Recipe: Pumpkin Spice Ale