A week after pitching, both halves of the batch appear to have settled down quite a bit. Both have a thick head of kräusen with braune Hefe on top. Both are still fermenting slowly (4 bubbles / min) and both are hovering at around 56 degrees F as measured by the stick-on liquid crystal thermometers.
So far, they are indistinguishable.
In an effort to test the efficacy of vegetable oils for replacing aeration of beer wort, I brewed eleven gallons to the following recipe:
The batch was split 5/5.5 gallons (I didn’t try to make them completely equal.) A 3-quart starter of White Labs WLP-001 was decanted to 1 quart, and split into two sanitized pint containers. One pint was dosed with 0.5 ml of flax oil and pitched into the 5-gallon batch, and the other was pitched into the 5.5-gallon batch, which was aerated by 1 minute of vigorous shaking (this is a departure from plan, as I could not find the hose that goes from my oxygen cylinder to my diffusion stone.)
Five hours after pitching, here’s what it looks like (the foam on the right is not kräusen; it is left over from the agitation of aeration):
So far, so meh, as I have been saying.
Update 2/19/2008 22:00
It looks like there is a little airlock pressure in the aerated batch. No such from the oiled batch, but it is showing signs of yeast activity. Photos after the break…
…because I didn’t.
Photographed last spring in Union Station.
I don’t know if this is true, but it is very intriguing:
When one of those collections [of souvenir postcards of lynchings] fell into the hands of a professional historian, it opened up a whole large statistical universe of lynching incidents, each of which came with a location, one or more names, dozens or hundreds of faces that can be identified, and importantly, a date. That made it possible to research not just a few lynchings, but hundreds of them, and to compile statistics on what had happened before and after them. And the terrible, but fascinating, bit of secret history turned out to be the immediate aftermath of over half of those lynchings. Over half of those lynchings turned out to involve black men who owned their own successful farms and/or businesses. And the day after the lynchings, those farms and businesses were sold to white neighbors, in closed auctions, for pennies on the dollar, and the surviving real heirs were run out of town. And in a terrifyingly large number of those cases, they were able to show one or more of the following facts. The buyer was the person who made the initial accusation against the victim. And the buyer was a relative of one or more of the following: the mayor, the chief of police, the local minister and/or the municipal judge.
This is leading up to Brad Hicks’ take on the murders in Kirkwood, MO.
That mead with the Montrachet yeast is in the front hall closet right now, bubbling away.
It’s making the house smell like someone needs to lay off the chili.
OG: 1.104.