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.
Just finished it, and I have a spoiler here:
The battle against the striders near the end is a lot easier once you realize that you can barrel-ass into the hunters with your car and it hurts them lots.
Now you know.
I got my water analyzed by Ward Labs, to see what I’m dealing with when I try all-grain brewing again. Not surprisingly, given the amount of minerals encrusted on the fixtures, it’s incredibly hard, but I am surprised that the carbonate content is low.
It’s actually not a bad approximation of Dublin’s water. Stout anyone?
The tale of the tape below the break.
Read the rest of this entry »
…so I will take the easy route and share this line from Andrew Olmsted’s posthumous letter, which I wish I hadn’t gotten to read:
But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.)
I didn’t know Andrew personally, but I enjoyed his writing, and am sad he’s gone.
Ordinary Bitter (10 gallons, OG 1.040)
9.9 pounds Briess Pilsen liquid malt extract
1 Pound 40L Crystal Malt
1 ounce Columbus pellet hops (13.5% α, 60 min)
1/2 ounce East Kent Goldings whole hops (6.3% α, 15 minutes)
1/2 ounce East Kent Goldings whole hops (6.3% α, steep 15 minutes)
Safale S-04 yeast / Safale US-05 yeast (split batch)
Had some trouble brewing this one — two boilovers in a half-barrel boiler (!) left hops from both boiled additions sticking to the sides and lid.
Also, my damned digital thermometer began lying to me, so I ended up chilling this way below pitching temperature — the S-04 had about 24 hours lag, and the US-05 still hadn’t fired up. I didn’t aerate the wort much, but with the large amount of yeast from the dried yeasts, that shouldn’t matter much.
Black Death 3 still remains to be brewed, although it might be postponed indefinitely for something more in the Trappist vein.