Monday, May 26, 2008

Tasting the Forest Bitter

It has been about a week since I bottled the Sherwood's Forest Bitter. I decided to give one a go to see how it is progressing.



As you can see, there isn't much head at the moment. It is also not very fizzy currently, which may be a good thing as it is also very sweet. Hopefully some of the sweetness will go as the sugar is converted to CO2.

I am not especially good at describing beers. It has a very similar smell to the wort at the moment. The taste is definitely very green. That said, it is not at all unpleasant, just a little sweet. Under the sweetness it has a very smooth, malty taste, with a nice bitter after taste.

All in all, I'm pretty happy, I just really hope the sweetness subsides. The final gravity of the brew was 1.013, which was a little above the target, again, so Im not that confident all the sweetness will go. Time will tell.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Getting the Rose Racked

I had intended to rack the rose last weekend at the same time as the plum. However, I somehow didn't get round to it (nothing to do with buying GTA 4 I might add ;-) ) I also meant to rack it yesterday, but somehow didn't get round to it, so I was determined that I would do it today. The bubbles had stopped coming through the airlock now.

Once again I sanitised the demijohn, airlock, gromit and syphon. While I did this, I took a gravity reading just to confirm fermentation was finished. The target was 0.990 to 0.996 for a rose.



I took the reading at 0.995, inside target.

I emptied the contents of the stabiliser into the empty demijohn and syphoned in the wine to mix it in.



I shook it as much as I could for the next few minutes, until the pressure stopped building up. I will repeat this as many times as possible over the next few days, before adding the finings.

Damn my lazyness

24 hours after racking the plum and I had been pretty slack. I only shook the contents up once. I now did it a second time, but I should really have done it at least 6 times by now according to the instructions.

I decided to give it another shake after 48 hours, even though I was only supposed to be shaking it for 24 hours. Hopefully the wine won't turn out to be fizzy. I believe it will just take longer to clear now. We shall see. I will certainly learn my lesson if it does affect the final product.

I returned the demijohn to The Brewery where it will remain until clear.

Racking the Plum Wine

It had been 3 weeks since I got the plum wine going, and the bubbles had completely stopped going through the airlock for at least a few days, so last Sunday (18th May) I decided it was time to get it racked into another demijohn and get it clearing.

The instructions for this wine do not mentioning racking, but given a lot of the sediment has already dropped out of the wine, and the next step involves shaking up the contents, it seems to make sense. I therefore sanitised the syphon, and spare demijohn, airlock and gromit. I added the contents of the stabiliser sachet to the empty demijohn, before syphoning the wine into it, once again starting it off with a quick suck.

Once all the wine had transferred, I added the sachet of plum flavouring, and the wine finings. I placed a gromit in the demijohn and shook it vigorously with my thumb over the hole, and then removed my thumb to release the pressure. I repeated this for a number of minutes until little pressure was building up. I then placed the airlock in the gromit and returned the wine to 'The Brewery', with the intention of shaking up the contents regularly over the next 24 hours.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Bottling the Sherwood's Forest Bitter

Time at last to get my 4th brew bottled...



I started by taking another gravity reading. My intention was to bottle whatever the reading, given I knew it was down at 1.013 a week and a half ago, so it should have had plenty of time to finish fermenting.



As you can see, the reading is still 1.013. I was a little surprised by this, as I thought that with the warmer weather, my problems of not getting brews down to the 1.010 target would disappear, but seemingly not. I was also a little worried that this meant that the brew had been sat for at the very least one and a half weeks having finished fermenting. Given the autolysis problems with the Linthwaite Light, I am perhaps over sensitive to leaving it in the bucket, but I just hope that this brew turns out fine.

I decided to try out an alternative to the painstaking task of sterilising bottles - putting the bottles in the dishwasher. Someone suggested this to me, and given I had only just emptied the bottles of their previous contents and had thoroughly rinsed them, I felt it was worth experimenting. (Please forgive the poor quality photo - the camera is full again so its from my phone.)



So with the bottles cleaning themselves (well almost), I got my 60 grams of brewing sugar dissolved in a little boiling water and microwaved it back to the boil, before putting it in the fridge to get it cool asap. I brought the brewing bucket into the kitchen and connected up the sanitised tube and let it hang into the cleaned washing up bowl. I knocked up some labels and a saucer of milk, and sanitised the crown caps.

I took a small sample from the tap on the bucket both to taste, and to ensure the tap was clear. It came out very cloudy to start with, and didn't wow me with its flavour, but it was unpleasant, and didn't seem to show any signs of the dreaded burnt rubber taste.

As soon as the sugar had cooled I gently stirred that into the beer and left while the bottles finished. Some time later they were all clean, dry and cooled and it was time to get the conveyor belt going. Unfortunately I was being pressured for time, given I had taken over the kitchen and it was rapidly approaching meal time, so I rather rushed the job, resulting in more than a couple of overflows as I filled the bottles to quickly while I capped and labelled the previous bottle. I learnt that the only thing more annoying than overflowing a bottle of your precious beer, is having the next bottle overflow as well, while trying to quickly clear up after the previous overflow and cap and label it too.

Anyway, at last I had 43 bottles of Sherwood's Forest Bitter, and hopefully it will take after the Stout that I am currently enjoying, rather than the Light that the fish in the channel are now probably breathing in.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Binning the Linthwaite Light.

With my latest brew just about ready to bottle, I decided it was finally make or break time for the Linthwaite Light. If you remember, this was the brew that I unfortunately left in the fermenting bucket for around 6 weeks before bottling, and as a result it was suffering from autolysis - where the yeast cells start to break down, leaving the associated burnt rubber smell and taste.

Tests of the brew over the few weeks following bottling showed the unpleasant flavour to be slowly reducing, though the smell was as strong and unpleasant as ever. Even with the slow subsiding of the undesirable flavour, the tastes left behind were not especially enjoyable.

Given I wasn't expecting the taste to ever become a good brew, I decided to bite the bullet and pour it all away, freeing up space in 'The Brewery' as well as bottles for my next brew. It also put an end to the constant chore of trying another bottle, only to gag on the smell, and the suffer the disappointment of tasting the beer.

So remember, get it bottled asap - don't be lazy.
Sometime in the future I will avenge these ghosts and brew a Linthwaite Light properly :-)

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Another Sunday lunch, another bottle of Merlot

As we sat down for Sunday lunch the Sunday before last, we decided to treat ourselves to another bottle of my Beaverdale Merlot. Thanks to the excellent idea of bottling it into half sized bottles, I feel able to dip into the supply when the occasion arises.



Once again I was very pleased with the product of my hard work. The flavour has clearly deepened a little further, and the overall finish is a little smoother and better balanced. I must make the effort to leave some bottles for a few months time, when it really will be a delight to drink.

Sherwood's Forest Bitter Gravity Check

As it approached the second weekend after starting the Forest Bitter off I took a gravity reading to see whether it would likely be ready to bottle over the weekend.



The reading was 1.013, slightly short of the 1.010 target. From this I deduced that it could use a little longer fermenting, so I gave it a stir with a sanitised stirrer and left it, with the intention of bottling the following weekend instead.

First taste of John Bull Irish Stout

A week last Friday, a week and a half after after bottling it, I decided to take my first taste of the John Bull Irish Stout.



It certainly looked the part, all be it without tremendous head retention. My primary concern was whether it had kept the deep, delicious coffee flavour I had so much enjoyed when I sampled some during bottling. Sadly, the answer to this was no, at least not with such depth. I would say there was a very subtle coffee undertone. That said, I certainly enjoyed my still very green pint of stout. It was very mild, most likely as a result of the extra water I added when I kicked off fermentation, but this made for a very relaxed and easy to drink stout. I rather suspect the flavours are going to grow and develop in the bottle, meaning that in a month or so, I will likely have a really enjoyable beverage - that is, if I can keep my hands off it that long :-)

Welcome to the new Bell's Beer Blog

If you have made it here, you are now viewing the new Bells Beer Home Brew Blog. I have just finished moving this blog, which was not without incident, so if you spot any problems I would be really grateful if you could add a comment to the post in question to let me know. Thanks.

With the move complete, I can now get back to the process of brewing my beer and wine, and reporting on it here. I already have a number of posts backed up, so expect them to appear in the next day or so.

Thanks for reading.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Ooops, overflowing Rose

I stated in my post 3 days ago, about kicking off the rose (Chablis Blush), that I made a silly mistake and filled it too high in the demijohn. I left it as it was, rather than pouring away the extra, as there was still an air gap, and it felt wrong to pour away some of what would be lovely wine in the not too distant future.



As you can see, pouring away the excess looks like it would have been a very good idea. I stupidly didn't check in on the wine until the strawberry wine needed topping up, so it may have had a couple of days like this before I realised. If I am honest, I also didn't sanitise the airlock given the wine wouldn't come in contact with that - would it ;-). All I can do now is hope that I have got away with it and the wine has not been contaminated. At least I know know you really shouldn't fill the demijohns above the 4.5 litre mark with these kits.

Topping up the Plum wine.

Three days after starting the plum wine going, it was time to top it up to the full 4.5 litres. The instructions simply stated it should be 'tepid' water. I took this to mean basically the same temperature as we wanted the wine to be fermenting in, so 20-25 degrees. I tried pouring just a little boiled water in the bottom of a 1litre jug and topping up the rest with cold tap water. I measured this and found it to be about 23 degrees so I added this and another 3 jugs to take the level up to the 4.5 litre sticker. I replaced the airlock and the job was done.