After 7 days of primary fermentation and 10 days of secondary fermentation, I’ve racked and bottled my porter. I feel that I made an error when mixing my corn sugar solution by putting it in my racking bucket only a few seconds after boiling it for the recommended 5 minutes. You mix the solution into the racking bucket to prime the beer before bottling, giving the yeast a nice meal before sealing it up. The bi-product of the yeast eating the sugar is CO2, and adding the natural carbonization to the bottled beer. My worry is that the very hot solution may have killed off a small percentage of my active yeast.
My theory is that it will be ok. If there are less yeast cells, they’ll simply take longer to multiply and do their job. We’ll see.
So, after 7 days of primary fermentation I have racked my porter to a secondary fermentation vessel. Per the recipe, I split a whole vanilla bean down the middle and put it in the beer. It will sit for another 10 days and should be ready to bottle after that.
I tasted the beer at this stage and definitely noticed its potential. It smelled better than it tasted. Obviously no carbonization and my palette isn’t a fan of flat beer. I’m excited to see how this one comes out.
I have decided to brew a Vanilla Bean Porter recipe that I purchased from the Home Brewing Depot in West Allis. I’m partial to the darker beers and stouts are my favorite. I really like the carmel and chocolate tastes in certain stouts and this one sounded perfect to me.
I also decided to graduate from a full malt/hop/grain extract kit to a recipe where I’d steep my own grains in a muslin bag (big tea bag for steeping hops, grains and adjuncts in your brew).
The beer includes Crystal Malt, Chocolate Malt, and Black Patent grains. It uses a Challenger hop for the bittering hops on the front end of the boil and Cascade hops for aroma near the end. During the secondary fermentation I get to split a vanilla bean and drop it in the fermenter.
I also used a liquid yeast in a Wyeast smack pack instead of pitching dry yeast like I did in Goosebrau. I’ll admit that I didn’t follow instructions and had to purchase another pack and re-pitch, as my fermentation was about 2% compared to my last batch. After I re-pitched my 2nd container of yeast it went off like gangbusters with some great CO2 action in my blow off tube.
I did watch a great video series on Expert Village by Mark Emiley. I’ll be watching more of his videos as I really liked his style of explanation. Here was the video series on brewing a porter. I learned a few tips that will likely improve my process and my brew next time. Off the top of my head, I won’t squeeze my muslin bags to extract every bit of liquid out of them. Rather, I’ll boil about 20 ounces of water, take off heat and pour/rinse the bags with that water. He said squeezing the bags will extract a lot of the natural tannins into the brew, which can cause undesirable tastes. Learning more every time.
My carboy is sitting in the basement, which has a room temp right now of 60 degrees. I pitched the 2nd batch of yeast on January 2nd, so nearly 2 days have gone by and I’m getting about 20 blow bubbles every 10 seconds out of my blow tube. It seems to be very aggressive, so I hope that is good news.
