entirely safe and fun

By Ninkasi, I do believe it’s beer!

By this Saturday, precisely one week after the beer went into the fermenter, the airlock had stopped bubbling and the specific gravity had settled at just about 1.012. The liquid in the bucket had an appetizing look, and it tasted undeniably like (flat) wheat beer. Success! Now, for bubbles.

Contra Yahoo Serious’ 1988 masterpiece (or at least high-water mark) Young Einstein, getting bubbles into beer doesn’t take earth-shattering genius or what the kids these days call rock-and-roll music. It does take CO₂, which you can get into the beer either by hooking up a tank of the gas to an airtight beer container — kegging or counterpressure bottle filling — or by having a small second fermentation in the bottle — bottle conditioning, frequently called the méthode champaignoise, for so champagne is made. I rather like bottle conditioning’s many merits (longer shelf life, aging potential, the nutritional benefit of leaving yeast in the beer) in spite of its flaws (sediment, clouding, hard to get exactly the right CO₂ pressure), and besides, I don’t own a counterpressure filler.

Ian plays the ancient Discordian game of “Sink” with the bottles. “I sunk Blue Moon’s pretensions to quality!”

To start, I transferred the finished beer to a fresh sanitized bucket, leaving behind a good half-inch of yeasty goop on the bottom of the fermenter, along with crusty malt deposits along the top, and little bits of floating matter such as escaped coriander seeds. I then dissolved 4oz of corn syrup in about 1.5 cups of boiling water, and added that to the beer, stirring thoroughly but trying not to further aerate the beer, which would be bad at this point. This sugar will be used by the yeast to generate my carbon dioxide. It’s true that fermentation had come completely to a halt in the bucket, but like Cthulhu, the yeast was not dead but merely dormant. It will wake up and start fermenting again, since the sugar-alcohol equilibrium has been disturbed. Finally, I cleaned the fermenter bucket and refilled it with sanitizer solution for use in cleaning the bottles.

Filling the bottles was deeply absorbing, as you can see.

A few nights previous, Ian and I had removed the labels from about 60 non-screw-top beer bottles, being careful to scrape off all the glue with razor blades. This is not just cosmetic. When you put bottles into a hot sanitizer solution, if they have glue on them, it will get into the sanitizer and then into the inside of the bottles, which is not cool. On bottling day, we blasted out any remaining dust or residues with my high-pressure bottle washer (fun!) and submerged the clean bottles into sanitizer for a few minutes, working in batches of about 12 bottles. We then rinsed them, let them drain thoroughly, and laid them out on a towel on the kitchen floor underneath the brewing bucket. Then, using a funnel, I siphoned out a full measure of beer into each bottle, leaving as little headspace as I could. In practice, this meant filling the bottles with the funnel all the way in, then removing the funnel to leave around 1/3″ of air at the top. As the final touch, I capped the bottles, and Ian rinsed off their outsides.

The capper is almost, but not quite, as cool as the high-pressure bottle washer.

Now, I just have to wait for a few days. Two things have to happen for the beer to be properly carbonated. First, the yeast needs to efficiently convert the corn sugar into gas, and second, that gas needs to reach a solution eqilibrium in the bottle. That usually takes about four days. Ideally, then, I’ll be hanging out my red star on Wednesday.

I’ve redesigned the site using a custom dynamic-width theme based on Srini G’s Fluid Blue theme. Now it will look less stupid on wide screens, I hope. If you’re using Internet Explorer, the header may be slightly broken*. I’m working on it, but in the meantime, have you considered switching to Firefox or Opera?

As for “Dynamic Entry”… well, it’s one of those Internets memes, don’t ya know. Here’s what I found:

*update 20 May 2007: I fixed this, but it’s ugly. Turns out that there are still a few box model issues even in Internet Explorer 7, which put most of them to bed. I had to do a sort of mini-browser-detection to see if a user is coming in with IE, and if so then reset the title’s padding in the style sheet. Yuck.

The home stretch!

The wort is fermented nearly dry at this point. It smells like wheat beer, it tastes like wheat beer… I think it may be wheat beer! Between today and yesterday, only one additional point (that is, .001 water densities) of solutes fermented out. The bubble rate is down to 4/min, which is probably high in that there was a bubble right at the beginning of my measurement interval. I think that the sampling theorem would normally dictate a sample interval of longer than one minute, at this point, for reliable measurement.

The last two days have seen the bubble rate at 6 and 4/min, the gravity at 1.0135 and 1.0125, and the change in SG at .0025 and .001, respectively. That leaves the correlation coefficient between bubble and SG change at .955, which I’ll call a high-quality result. Going forward, I’ll be more willing to trust the airlock as an indicator of fermentation progress than I was before.

If the final gravity is indeed 1.012-1.0125, then I’ll be looking at a beer with around 4.6% alcohol by volume, minus probably negligible losses to higher organics via secondary metabolic pathways. It’s right on target for the yeast strain’s 75% attenuation, assuming that a point or two of the weight of the beer was coming from sources other than fermentable sugars. Science is fun!

Part 1 of this series is here; part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.

After five days in the fermenter, 38 gravity points of sugar have been transformed into something happier. As of this evening, the wheat beer is down to a specific gravity of 1.016, near the final gravity it’s likely to settle at. Beer has almost happened here!

One of the things I’d like to do is correlate fermentation activity with bubble rate a little more confidently. Now, absolute bubble rate is not comparable across fermenter setups, or even between batches, and perhaps not even between measurements which require the top to come off. There’s no hope of reliably saying something like “oh, 30 bubbles per second means that we’re fermenting out 8 points per day.” But it’s possible that we’ll be able to say that, in general, fermentation rate within a batch correlate pretty strongly with day-over-day change in specific gravity, that is, that more bubbles means more fermentation. The rate of bubbling depends on the volume of the headspace between the top of the beer and the bucket lid, on the level to which the airlock is filled with water, on precisely how tightly the bucket’s lid fits… but also, we hope to show, on the speed with which CO₂ is being generated.

Here’s four days’ worth of measurements from this batch:

For the three bubble measurements available — a pretty thin data set, to be sure — the correlation coefficient between the bubble rate and the real fermentation rate (ΔSG/day) is 0.997, which is very significant, even more so than I expected. It will be interesting to see how it holds up with more measurements.

Part 1 of this series is here; part 2 is here.

The yeast is bubbling merrily away and has made a significant dent in the sugar. I’m seeing 94 bubbles a minute in the airlock — the bubbling rate is proportional to the yeast’s metabolic rate along the efficient metabolic pathways that produce carbon dioxide, so it is a back-of-the-envelope estimate of brewing progress. For harder numbers, I turned to the hydrometer, which revealed that the beer is already down to a specific gravity of 1.032. That is some fast brewing!

For the record: On Saturday, I established that the original gravity was 1.054; Sunday, with the yeast just taking hold, I measured it at 1.050.

Part 1 can be found here.

Sanitation is next to sanity.

Today’s project: a kind of hybrid wheat beer, using the spices of a Belgian wit but an all-German malt bill and yeast culture. I decided to make my first beer in nearly four years a simple one, with no addition of grains; here, I’ll just use dry malt extract (DME) as my source of fermentable sugars.

The recipe I’ll be following is this: Sanitize a five-gallon fermenter bucket, its lid, an airlock, etc (see the first picture). Boil 3.25 gallons of water in a big pot. Add 6 lbs Bavarian wheat DME, which is 60% pale barley and 40% wheat. Also, throw in about half an ounce of your favorite bittering hops (it’s not going to be an important flavor component, so you might as well pick something cheap). Return to boiling, and hold it there for forty minutes, stirring frequently. Then, add .5oz bitter orange peel, dried. Keep stirring for another fifteen minutes. Then, add 1oz crushed coriander. Stir for another five minutes. Turn off the heat. Siphon off the wort (for so this sweet solution of malt sugar is called) into a food-grade plastic bucket with a little less than 16lbs of ice in it, straining out any solids. Thoroughly aerate the wort and ensure that all the ice is melted, then check the temperature. If it’s between 60°F and 80°, add water to bring the level of the whole mixture up to 5gal. If it’s too cold (unlikely), add warm water; too warm, add ice. Pitch in one dose, calculated according to the directions on the package, of German-type wheatbeer yeast (I used Wyeast 3638). Check gravity, put on the lid, and wait. Pictures below…

When I came to the Valley, I didn’t expect to get much use out of my impractical (but, I hope, tasteful!) philosophy education. But in fact, my cow orkers have a delightfully high density of interest in the metaphysics of ethics. Behold my whiteboard:

What Kant didn’t say is that a universal moral rule should be at least as tasty and nutritious as pure evil.
Also, for the record, I misspelled “flocculates” in my contribution.

Koan

The control which can be frobbed is not the true control. / Photo: Ian Easton

Earlier this evening, Punam and I used the self-checkout station at the grocery store. At first, everything proceeded normally - I entered my club card number, scanned the OJ and veggies, indicated that we were done, and chose to pay by card. The familiar prompt appeared on the touchscreen: “Please use the PIN pad to complete your transaction.” I looked down at the display of the PIN pad, which helpfully was telling me to “USE TOUCHSCREEN TO COMPLETE TRANSACTION.” The completion of the transaction did not inhere in the PIN pad or the touchscreen, but in the resignation of the possibility of completion.

At that moment, we achieved enlightenment.

Then the Clerk responsible for overseeing the self-checkouts plokta’d (pressed lots of keys to abort) the PIN pad to induce an error state in the system, from which it recovered normally and re-prompted me to choose a method of payment.

Colin’s Commentary

Truly, Clerk has the Buddha-nature. But does the PIN pad? The touchscreen? To answer is to demonstrate your own lack!

Neither rain nor rock becomes a canyon.
Neither PIN pad nor touchscreen
offers direction toward enlightenment.
The master unlocks any door with every key, all at once.

More koans here.