Number One: Bottling & Tasting

When last I blogged on my new hobby of homebrewing I had placed the wort into the fermenter and was waiting to see what would happen.  A lot of interesting things happened since then some of which were good and some not so good.  Let me start of by saying that Tom and I have successfully created what can be called beer.  Huzzah!

Bottling

My understanding was that the brew was meant to stay in the fermenter until visible signs of fermentation had ceased and the gravity had dropped into the range specified by the recipe.  For those who do not know, the gravity is basically testing to see how much sugar is still in the beer.  If there is a lot then the yeast should be able to convert it into more alcohol.  This is where I believe I made my first mistake.  After the fermentation had stopped and the gravity had not changed for a couple of days I should have bottled the beer.  Now the recipe said that it would likely be a week in the fermenter before moving to bottles.  Due to the fact that visible signs of fermentation did not appear until about 67 hours into the process I assumed that I should let it stay in the fermenter longer.  All in all the beer spent about 19 days in the fermenter.  This unfortunately can lead to letting the yeast eat the dead yeast which supposedly can add odd flavors to the beer.  Another issue was that I had used the bottling bucket as the primary fermenter so I had to siphon the beer from it into what was actually supposed to be the primary fermenter and then back after cleaning the bottling bucket.  Doing this chanced the addition of extra air into the beer which also could cause odd flavors.  A very gentle siphon job was necessary.  Let me say… the room smelled absolutely heavenly at this point.  The beer smelled amazingly good so Tom and I thought we might just have a winner.

Bottling was really quite a fun experience.  By suggestion of one of the employees at Maryland Homebrew we attached the bottling rod directly to the spigot on the bottling bucket.  This meant I just had to hold a bottle up until the tip of the rod touched the bottle of the bucket.  No moving a long tube around.  Using Red Barron Bottle Capper took a little bit of trial and error before realizing the right amount of pressure.  Luckily no bottle necks were cleaved off.  After bottling we were upset to remember we had to wait about 2 weeks before the beer would be finished.  When it was completed we would have 48 bottles of beer.

Tasting

Saying that Tom and I were eager to taste the beer is a huge under statement.  We wanted so badly to taste the beer that we actually opened a couple of bottles one week after bottling.  While this was a week early it was partially because we wanted to know if through some miracle it was ready and also we were curious as to what was going on in the bottle.  I packed some bottles up and drove over to Tom’s house to toss them in the fridge.  Unfortunately during the 7 minute drive to Tom’s house the beer fell over twice.  Hoping this was not an issue we left the beer in the fridge for about 1.5 hours and then poured and tried it.  Unfortunately due to the shaking the beer had not yet settled.  Had it been commercial beer it might have been okay at that point but because home-brewed beer has some sediment in the bottom of the bottle it was not.  The beer foamed up until the whole pint glass was full of head.  After waiting for the head to come down and pouring all but the last 1/2 inch of beer into the glass we toasted and tried the beer.  To our delight it tasted mostly like flat beer with a bit more yeast than necessary.  There was a slight off flavor but I attributed it to the floating sediment due to shaking.

A week later, it had now been the full 2 weeks, I opened another bottle to see if I wanted to bring some down to my friends and family.  To my surprise the beer was beautiful with a nice red color and some wonderful carbonation.  Did I say wonderful carbonation?  What I meant to say was it was highly carbonated.  Everyone who tasted the brew agreed that there was an odd flavor to the beer.  My wife would not even drink it!  Luckily no one else thought it was that bad but no one could put their finger on what exactly it tasted like.  Most agreed that it was drinkable but that they would not buy this beer, not that I could sell it without the proper permits anyway.

In my opinion the beer was drinkable and while not bad, definitely not something I wanted to drink without a couple of other beers in me already.  Luckily Tom thought otherwise so he has consumed a majority of the batch.  Out of an original 48 bottles there are now only about 6 left.

I dropped a bottle of this batch of beer off at the Maryland Homebrew store so that they could taste it and let me know what I did wrong and what I could do better.  Hopefully they will get back to me shortly and I will have another post on our lesson’s learned during our first homebrewing venture.