B-day roundup

With a nose full of sea air and a headful of dramatic lack of sleep, it's time to round up this first brew day.

Yesterday (okay, I'll concede the point and call it "this morning" if you insist) saw me connecting my 12-plate counterflow wort cooler to the kitchen sink water supply.

All technicalities aside: a wort cooler is essentially a piece of "boys-n-their-toys" hardware which will (du-uh) cool the wort from boiling temperature to about 20°C in no time. Rapid cooling is essential as it will minimize the risk of infecting the wort with all kinds of nasties which float abundantly in the air.

It looks a bit like something someone salvaged from a trainwreck.

See those tubes? Cold water flows one way, hot wort the other.

At least, that's the theory.

In my case, cold water flowed one way, and nothing much was flowing the other way. Not consistently, anyway, and after more than an hour of fiddling with tubes and cursing in increasing vociferosity, the kitchen floor found itself adorned with a nicely congealing puddle of sticky wort.
As it was somewhat past bedtime by then(*), I decided to take what brewers call "a shortcut" and simply use my perforated bucket to filter the now hand-cool wort into the fermenting vessel.

(*) correction. It was nearly time to get up again.

The result, apart from a kitchen floor which made my socks sound like velcro, was this magnificently clear and translucent wort:

Those floating bits are "added vitamins and micro nutrients".

There's probably ways to get rid of all that muck, but at 3AM, my inclination was to "sod it all". I pitched the yeast, which I'd reawoken earlier on by dousing it with 1060 wort.

And whaddayaknow?

The world's first monochromatic pizza margharita

The yeast was doing so well that by this morning it had lifted quite a lot of that floating muck to the surface, where it was sitting on top of the yeast head. Valuable lesson: treat yeast right and it'll clean up your shit for you.

I skimmed off most of the hoppy bits and the brown scum, leaving the head mostly intact so as not to compromise the sanitary state of my beer (because yes it's now called beer at this stage).

Fitted an airlock and now it's time to sit back and watch the bubbles.

...and protect the beer from unsanitised intruders...



So there you have it. That's most of the messy work done. The rest is less messy but infitely harder: let the yeast do its work. Resist the temptation to constantly peek into the fermenting vessel. Do not obsessively check the airlock. Stop worrying about SG. Drink great beers without despairing my own will be crap.

I've made a fair bundle of mistakes this first time around, which I'll happily outline at some later time.

Until that time,

Greetz

Jo