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In the end, I believe we did end up transferring the beer to the secondary. The next hurdle was to figure out how long to leave it there before we could bottle it. Anyone in home brewing knows about stories of exploding bottles, and we were eager to avoid that problem. One way to avoid that was to leave the in the secondary fermenter for a long time to ensure that all fermentable sugar had been fermented. Looking back, we probably let it ferment for 4 weeks, and in retrospect that was too long. I honestly don’t remember the first time I bottled home brew or where I sanitized 48 IBC root beer bottles, but I do remember that to avoid the cost of purchasing a capper, we rented one for $2 a day at DeFalco’s. The resulting beer was mediocre. I remember that it had a strong hop aroma, but it wasn’t flowery and fresh like I would expect from a commercially produced microbrew. In retrospect, the beer may have been passable but the limitations of my own beer experience my have hampered my appreciation of the brew. At one point I brought a bottle to DeFalco’s to be sampled and they indicated it was OK but not great. I suspect that the beer was free of major flaws, but would have greatly benefited from a number of changes such as using filtered water, much less time in the secondary fermenter, and the use of a larger brew pot to enable boiling of more of the wort. The brewing yeasts available at the time were not the same quality as the ones 20 years later, and any homebrew of that era would have benefited greatly from better yeast. We probably would have also benefited from studying one of the more established home brewing texts in addition to the Bill Mares book. His book is a fine read, but should only serve as a starting off point for a home brewer’s library. Over the months, I continued on with my brewing ventures. The biggest ongoing problem was finding a suitable brewing venue. After brewing at a different friend’s house, I contemplated brewing at home. I figured that it would be no more difficult than the other attempts. The problem of storing 48 IBC root beer bottles and a five gallon fermenter was another issue to overcome. Growing up, I had always been interested in woodworking. In particular I liked building boxes. The obvious solution was to build a giant box that would accommodate two cases of bottles plus at least one carboy. I could lock the box to keep the contents hidden. Somehow, probably while sitting in English class, I devised a box that had perfectly efficient dimensions: The box was high enough to contain a carboy with a fermentation lock on top. It was also just wide enough to accommodate the width of two 6-packs of bottles and could hold a total of two cases with room to spare. Finally, the whole box would fit perfectly in my bedroom closet under a shelf. It would blend in with all of the other stuff in the closet. So, one day I geared up to brew at home in my room on the second floor of the house. I had access to the bathroom where I could get water, and all of the equipment was in place. I located the hot plate on my desk and ran the operation there. I opened the windows so that the grain and hop aromas from the boiling wort (unfermented beer) could escape without flowing through the whole house. |
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| Thursday, November 20, 2008 |
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