2/11 Edelweiss

Ingredients:
5 lbs Pale wheat malt
2.5 lbs German Pilsner malt
2 lbs Munich malt
0.5 lbs Melanoidin malt
0.5 oz Centennial hops
0.25 oz Amarillo hops
1 packet White Labs Hefeweizen Ale

Method:
Crush the malt and steep at 144-152 °F in 2.5 gal water for 60 mins.
Filter the mixture and pour 5 gal water over the mash.
Simmer for 60 mins.
Add half of the Centennial hops when mixture starts to boil.
Add rest of Centennial hops after 30 mins.
Add Amarillo hops after 58 mins.
Chill to 70°F, filter the mixture and pour into a container.
Add Yeast and leave sealed in the container at for 3 days for primary fermentation.
Bottle for secondary fermentation and carbonation and leave for 7 days.

This recipe is copied from the brooklyn brew shop book.


This is the second recipe I’m following through and I personally like Hefeweizen Ale. So I am pretty excited to see how this will turn out.

It seems that the instruction for water is way too much. A total of 7.5 gal of liquid reduced to 5 gal? I don’t even know if that’s possible. Anyways, I had to reduce the amount of water for sparging. Instead of 5 gal of water, I used 3 gal for sparging. And it actually ended up perfect at 4.5 - 5 gal at the end. So I guess this is ok.

2/14 Bottling

Yield: 41 bottles
Before I get into bottling, I should note that the cap pop up during fermentation. I think what happened was the rapid fermentation created too many bubbles, and which carried stuff up to the airlock chamber, which in turn clogged up the system and busted open the top, which resulted in spillage and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Note to self: remember to use tube for first 3 days of fermentation instead of airlock.
Bottling wasn’t hard, this batch yielded 41 bottles.

Before

After

2/28 - Taste

I believe failing to follow the instruction of adding 7.5 gallon of water is a bad decision. It might be ultimately the reason why the cap popped out. It might also be why the beer is extremely foamy and filled with bubble. I should be more aware of the fermentation state before put the beer into the bottle. It sure is tricky to make this one. Too early, you end up with over-carbonated beer; too late, you'd get flat beer. I will someday do this one again!

Let's go back to the taste, the over-carbonate seems to kill the taste buds before the flavor of the beer can hit the pallet. If you could somehow get pass that though, it actually taste very much like your typical hefeweizen. I do prefer less of a yeasty taste though, so i might do an extra two days of secondary fermentation before bottling.

Free beer 1.0 attempt #2 (5 gallon) (01/29/2012)

Method:

Crush the malt and steep at 55 °C in 3 gal water for 90min.
Filter the mixture and pour 2 gal water over the mash.
Add hops, guaraná berries and sugar and simmer at 98 °C for 60min.
Chill to 25°C, filter the mixture and pour into a container.
Add Yeast and leave sealed in the container at 20°C for 14 days for primary fermentation.
Transfer the mixture to a clean container and add 75g sugar and 2 tablespoonful yeast from the bottom of the primary fermentation container.
Bottle for secondary fermentation and carbonation and leave at 20°C for 8-10 days.
Store bottles at 12-14°C for another 14 days.

This time we have scaled up to a 5 gallon setup and tries to get more beer for the same amount of work, but it seems that there is a lot of unexpected things happen when you scale up the process.

The 5 gallon pot does not sit well on the electric range, results in the pot not heating up properly for 1 hour, after that, it finally reached 55 C and I did steep the malt in the water for 90 mins. Mixtures is then filtered, but it took another 15 mins before I give up and use the portable gas range to heat the wort, and that took about 90 minutes from start to complete.

Due to all the extra time on the heat, I am not sure if the result would be the same as before. Another note is we used cane sugar this time, the color of the mixture does not look as dark as before anymore.

2/11 Bottling Free Beer 1.0 attempt #2

Yield: 34 bottles
Pretty painless process. Just adding secondary fermentation sugar, and bottle up! Sharon wanted to be more experimental, so she added salt into two of the bottles and we’ll see what happen to those. Also, I have moved out 1 gallon of the beer into the small jug for crashing.

2/14 Bottling Free Beer 1.0 attempt #2 (crashed)

Yield: 8 bottles

Forgot to take a picture, but crashing helped on the clarity of the beer, and most of the yeast and sediment sunk to the bottom of the jug. There wasn’t much of it, but definitely noticeable.
I believe these will need a little longer for secondary fermentation to complete carbonation. I hope there is enough yeast inside each bottle for fermentation too!

Secondary fermentation note: 2/21
It's worth-noting that one of the beer bottle from the crashed batch exploded. I believe this is related to sugar not mixing well before bottling. It is more of a problem for the crashed batch as the lower temperature might have constitute to the bad mixing.

Taste:
It seems like there are some inconsistency on how the free beer taste bottle to bottle. It might be an issue of sugar didn't mix well; however, most of the beer came out nice and spicy, with wheaty after taste, but some tasted like plain alcohol.
It is important to note how much difference crashing the beer made though, out come is crisp and cool, out with the yeasty flavor, and in with a clear character that does not exist in the regular one.

Back Log: Free beer 1.0 (12/04/2011)

http://freebeer.org/blog/recipe

FREE BEER version 1.0 (codename: “Vores Øl”)

Recipe for 25 L, (5.6% vol.)

Ingredients:

1800 g Pilsner malt

1200 g Münschener malt

300 g Medium Caramel malt

300 g Lager malt

18 g Tetnang bitter hops

15 g Hallertaver aroma hops

90 g Guaraná

1200 g Sugar

Safbrew T-58 Yeast

Method:

Crush the malt and steep at 55 °C in 15 L water for 90min.

Filter the mixture and pour 10 L water over the mash.

Add hops, guaraná berries and sugar and simmer at 98 °C for 60min.

Chill to 25°C, filter the mixture and pour into a container.

Add Yeast and leave sealed in the container at 20°C for 14 days for primary fermentation.

Transfer the mixture to a clean container and add 100g sugar and 2 tablespoonful yeast from the bottom of the primary fermentation container.

Bottle for secondary fermentation and carbonation and leave at 20°C for 8-10 days.

Store bottles at 12-14°C for another 14 days.

Can’t find where to buy guarana berry, so it might lack some flavor... and caffeine. Also used ~60% brown sugar, so taste might be a little different than using corn sugar as suggested.

Also should note we added sugar while steeping the malt instead of simmering the wart.

Since the batch is smaller than the orginal recipe, I’ve used less yeast for fermentation also, hopefully eyeballing it is good enough.

Bottling secondary fermentation starts on 12/18

Bottling is rather painless with an extra hand thanks to Alex. We didn’t evenly distribute into all 7 bottles though. This time we did add sugar, about 20g for 1 gallon, hopefully it’s enough to create bubble.

Beer taste great, foams up pretty well, but the beer’s color is darker than a usual Pilsner because of brown sugar and the medium caramel malt. We can try to make a lighter color variation by using a pale caramel malt and cane sugar or corn sugar.

Hello World!

I'm trying to log all the steps I've put into brewing my home brew here. I will try to log all my steps here.