Pumking Bottling

Tonight we bottled our Pumking clone and got a little glimpse of how the taste is progressing with all the stuff we added in the secondary. Start to finish, the whole bottling only took an hour which is great. This is our first time bottling with bombers too - from our two gallon batch we ended up with five 22oz bombers and 11 regular bottles.

In order to get a final gravity reading, we siphoned a little bit of the beer off to a cup before it hit the bottling bucket. That way the gravity reading isn't affected by the priming sugar. Reading came out to 1.015, which means we didn't get any extra points during secondary fermentation.

The taste was pretty good so far. It's not quite as strong as Southern Tier Pumking, which may get back to getting less malt into the wort than we intended. But, I think you can actually tell that it's Pumking we were shooting for. If the same holds true for the final beer, we'll consider it a success.

[ Pumking Racking ] <--- | ---> [ Pumqueen Tasting ]

Bug Juice Tasting

It's been just over two weeks since we bottled our "Bug Juice" dunkelweizen. Having our brewing buddies over again was the perfect excuse to crack open a couple bottles and see how they're doing. As soon as we broke the seal on the bottle cap, it was a good sign - that characteristic psshhh of a carbonated bottle. Then with the pour, plenty of foamy head! We finally produced a carbonated beer!

We've had very little carbonation in our El Jefe or Tumbler Clone after a month or more of bottle conditioning, and after just two weeks we have great carbonation with Bug Juice. The best theory we can come up with so far is that the krausen hadn't fallen with the first two beers when we racked, but it had with Bug Juice. Maybe with the krausen not fallen yet, we lost a lot of yeast when we racked to the secondary with those first two beers. Luckily the krausen had fallen with the pumking clone, so there's hope we'll get good carbonation from that beer too.

As for the taste - it was a little on the sweet side and maybe slightly acidic. Not great, but certainly drinkable. I'm thinking another week or two in the bottle might round out some of the rough edges. We're still making steps in the right direction with our home brewing though, and hopefully we have better and better beers ahead of us.

Oh, and the Bug Juice name? Well, if you don't know, you'll just have to poke around the blog until you figure it out! :-)

[ Dunkelweizen Bottling ] <--- | ---> [ Bug Juice Tasting - Part 2 ]

Pumking Racking

Monday night we racked our Pumking clone and got our first taste of how it's going. This is our first beer where the recipe calls for adding ingredients to the secondary. One of the ingredients was a spice extract we made ourselves with vodka and a mix of spices. Apparently we should have used more vodka, because there was very little liquid sitting atop a bunch of spice sludge. Measuring the right amounts was already a little hard because we had to divide all the ingredients between the two carboys. The spice sludge just made measuring the amounts that much harder.

After we got the ingredients added to the carboys, the rest of racking went very well. We ended up with two cups of liquid left over after filling the carboys, so the 2.4 gallon batch volume seems to be just about right. I feel like we're gradually getting the beersmith settings dialed in.

The gravity after primary fermentation is down to 1.015, which puts us at about 6.2% ABV. It's less than our original target of over 8%, but I think that's mostly because of the boil volumes and all the sugars that ended up all over our stove. :-) Considering this was our first attempt at mashing, just the fact that we produced enough fermentable sugars in the mash to get from 1.062 down to 1.015 is a success.

The taste at this stage had a mild pumpkin and spice flavor to it. With all the great-smelling things we added to the secondary, it seems like it could really come out well.

[ Pumking Clone Brew Day ] <--- | ---> [ Pumking Bottling ]

Dunkelweizen Bottling

Friday we bottled the dunkelweizen with our brewing buddies over to help. It was certainly a lot easier with the extra hands there. We ended up with ten bottles total from our gallon of beer. The sweaty sock smell we noticed while racking from the primary seems to be gone. It really tasted like it could be good once it's cold and has some carbonation.

That night we also cracked open one of the tumbler clone bottles to see how it was doing. Very slightly carbonated, but so far it seems to be tasting good and hopefully it'll get a lot more carbonation over the next two or three weeks.

[ Dunkelweizen Racking ] <--- | ---> [ Bug Juice Tasting ]

El Jefe Tasting - Part 2

It's been two weeks since our failed tasting of the El Jefe hefeweizen. Since then, we moved the bottles up from the basement to the first floor where it's a couple degrees warmer. We also took each of the few remaining hefeweizen bottles and turned them upside down to mix up the sugar sitting on the bottom.

The result: we finally have some carbonation! Not a ton, but definitely more than the flat beer of two weeks ago. The sugary sweetness from two weeks ago was also pretty much gone and the result was actually a pretty drinkable beer. I'm not sure if any of the things we did fixed the problem, or if it was simply a matter of waiting longer for the yeast to get to work. Either way, it's exciting that our first batch of home brew produced something drinkable. :-)

[ El Jefe Tasting ] <---

Pumking Clone Brew Day

Today we did our first all-grain brew, which we did using the Brew in a Bag (BIAB) method of all-grain. We're shooting for a 2-gallon batch of Pumking clone using the recipe we found at Pedal To The Kettle. As expected, lots of lessons learned from our first time with the technique.

The first issue we encountered was with the volume of water for the mash. Given evaporation, boil off, and grains soaking up water, the ideal starting water for our batch would have been about 4 gallons. But, with just a 5-gallon kettle and 6+ lbs of grain to fit in, we decided to just go with 3 gallons of water for the mash instead. If we want to do full volume mashing for even just a 2 gallon batch, we're going to need something bigger than a 5 gallon kettle.

Temperature-wise, the mash seemed to go just fine. We started with water at 160 and then, after adding room-temp grains, the mash started at 152. Even without any insulation for the kettle, the mash only dropped down to about 149 over the course of an hour. We could have added a little more heat to keep it in the 150s, but I think 149 should be just fine for starch conversion.

The hardest part of the day was lautering with the brew bag. When we pulled the bag out of the kettle it felt like we were pulling all of the liquid out with it. We tried setting it in a colander to let the water drain out, but the bag with all the grains was so wide that wort started spilling out over the sides, making a mess of the stove top. We ended up taking a huge bowl, wider than the kettle, and setting the bag in that to let it drain. Amy also squeezed the bag to get more of the liquid out, but with all the hot water in there, that wasn't easy either. In the end, we got to a little over 2.5 gallons of wort from the mash. Not a ton of water loss but it took a lot of work to get there. In the future we need some sort of strainer solution that makes it a lot easier to drain the water out of the bag.

To get to our 3.5 gallon pre-boil volume, we added almost a gallon of water to the kettle after mashing. In retrospect, we should have sparged this water through the grains to get some more of the sugar.

The rest of the brew day was pretty straightforward. The only issue we ran into was having enough wort to reach our 2.4 gallon batch volume and still have enough left for a gravity reading. The 5 cups left over in the kettle was all trub, so we ended up pulling wort from the primary, doing the reading, then dumping it back into the primary. Next time I need to calculate in more than 0.3 gallons for trub loss so that we have more wort to play with when transferring to primary.

The original gravity came out to 1.062 - way below our target of 1.080. It looks like we have some work to do on our BIAB efficiency. One thing we could have done was sparge the added water through the grains to get some more sugar. We also could have done a finer crush on the grains - perhaps by having the brew store double-mill the grains if they can't just configure the mill differently. Another little thing we could do is use a mash pH stabilizer to increase efficiency.

So the two big issues of the day were draining the brew bag (lautering) and brew efficiency. Hopefully we can get those worked out for future BIAB brews. I still think the technique could work out well and give us all the advantages of all-grain without adding all that much time to the brew day compared to extract brewing. And hopefully despite the issues, we still end up with a tasty pumpkin beer in a month or so.

---> [ Pumking Racking ]