Suicide bombers

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I want to write about an issue that has recently hit very close to home in my part of the world: Suicide bottles, a.k.a. Bottle bombs.

We all know that feeling of coming home in the evening and smelling that intoxicating aroma of beer merrily fermenting somewhere about the house. It's a great smell, full of promise and future, and is a fantastic thing to come home to, as I did a couple of nights ago. I stepped into my living room to the smell of fermentation and thought "wow, this IPA in the fridge is going to be great". It was late at night, and I was carrying the miniature brewmisstress in my arms, so I went to sleep and thought nothing of it.

The following morning, yesterday, I woke up with a nagging feeling. I couldn't quite place it. I went through my morning routine and got ready to leave the house when it suddenly hit me: The IPA was done fermenting three days ago! It shouldn't smell like this! I should check on the beer! So I went to the fermentation fridge, and opened the door...

*Crunch...* The sound of grating glass as the fridge door opened to reveal the devastation inside. It Seemed that my entire stock of cider (8 bottles) had decided to commit seppuku together, and take my fridge with it. Well they failed on the last part, as the fridge still worked, but it was coated, and I mean COATED with a fine coat of glass shards stuck onto every available surface with sticky, sticky dried cider. Add to this the dried remains of the latest yeast irruption from the fermentor, and you can only guess at what my fridge looked (and smelled like). It was incredible. And extremely messy.

I wont bore you with the details of the cleanup except to say that it took blood, sweat, and tears (the baby was crying) to clean it up. Not to mention a whole roll of paper towels, some rags that may never be used again, and lots of vinegar water. At the end, though, the fridge was back to it's usual sparkly-clean self (um, yeah, usual) and the beer that survived the explosions wiped down and placed back. I even found some odd bottles I forgot I had.

Of course, this is all my fault. Back when I made the cider I had made it with rather too high a starting gravity (1.079), and in order to avoid having 10% cider I cold crashed it when it still had a good amount of sugar in it. It's been sitting at temps that have been getting slowly higher with the last couple of brews, and finally, with the IPA fermenting at a whopping 20C it could take no more. The yeast had woken up with the heat, found sugar, and got to eating. And the rest is very messy history.. :)

So what have we learned? (I should say, re-learned. I should already know these things..)
- That bottle bombs are real. They are not a myth, and they have quite a spectacular force.
- That when you store beer, you have to be mindful of the temperature it will hit in storage. This is why is a good idea to let the beer carbonate at a rather a ambient temp, btw.
- That cold crashing really doesn't kill the yeast. They're hardy little tikes, and they loooove their sugar.

Luckily there were no casualties other than the cider, which no one was drinking. It was also stored in useless green and clear bottles, so no loss there. I already bought a new can of apple concentrate, and am planning to make cinnamon-spiced cyser when I get the chance. I think this time, I'll aim at OG of 1.055..

My cider will kick your beer's butt!

I made hard cider a couple of weeks ago.
I made cider because brewing all grain is a lengthy process, and I'm not allowed to do it until the baby comes. I brewed a couple of extract beers in the meantime, which was kinda nice (like going back to a family sedan after a long time or riding a motorcycle) but boring. So I moved on to other alcoholic beverages.

Cider is remarkably easy to make. You mix apple concentrate with enough water, add sugar, boil a bit, cool, and pitch. That's it. Of course, never content to do things the easy way, I ended up adding not quite enough water, and added in all the inverted sugar I had on hand (about half a kilo, to an 8liter batch) and so I ended up with cider that had a starting gravity of 1.079. Given that I could expect it to drop to about 1.005 if I let it ferment all the way, I was looking at almost 10% ABV. A bit high for a fruit drink. It would be better if I could stop the fermentation before it went all the way.

One way to stop the fermentation, or at least to dramatically reduce it, is to keep the drink cold, and remove as much of the yeast as you can. Of course, you can't go in there with a sieve and fish the yeast out, but it turns out that if you cool the liquid, the yeast will go dormant and fall out of suspension. Which is a win win situation, if you can get the thing cold enough. 4-5 degrees C ought to do the trick. This is called "Cold crash".

Ah, but there's a problem: My fridge, which has been the subject of much consternation lately, is nowhere near that cold. And given that it is currently fermenting lager, it shouldn't be that cold. What can you do?

Enter the MLCS-7 Massive Liquid Cooling System. Also known as "my mash tan cooler, with about 7 liters of ice:
I have a pretty small mash tan, but my small fermentator fits in it perfectly. I put it in the middle, put as much ice around it as I could (in re-freezable plastic bottles) and topped it off with cold tap water. To carry the heat better I connected my pump to circulate the water from the bottom of the tan back on top. This turn out to be completely unnecessary as, within 12 hours, the temperature of the water dropped to an incredible 1.3 degrees C - my actual fridge doesn't get that cold!

After about 42 hours the cider was so thoroughly cold crashed that it had virtually gone through the floor. I transferred it to a bottling bucket, leaving behind most yeast, added a bit of sugar (totally unnecessary since after the crash it read 1.025, which meant it still had plenty of sugar in it, but old habits die hard) and bottled about 8 liters of golden goodness. It's sweet, eminently drinkable, girls like it, and at 8% Alcohol By Volume it will kick your butt!

As a side note: Heat is energy, and energy can only be transferred, not destroyed. I got a great illustration of this during the cold crash process. I would rotate the ice bottles in and out of the cooler, taking freshly frozen bottles from the freezer, and putting half-thawed bottles back in. As a result, the temperature in my freezer rose dramatically from about 7-8 degrees below to 1-2 degrees below zero, as the freezer worked to dissipate the heat energy that the ice had gathered. Now that I've finished the process, and the freezer doesn't have to deal with the extra heat, the temperature in there had fallen as low as -8.5C. Which is great for trying to lager my lager in the fridge. But that's a different story.