I brewed a Scotch Wee Heavy over the weekend.
For those who may not be familiar with the style, a Wee Heavy is a ridiculously large beer, with a starting gravity of 1.070 to 1.130, a malty profile, and low bitterness. It is a challenging beer to make balanced. With this much alcohol and sugar, you run a real risk of having cloying, burning, and just plain weird.
One of the biggest issues with this kind of beer is taking care of your yeast. Where as with a 1.040 beer you can get away with under-pitching, under-aerating, or slightly distressed yeast, and still have a decent beer. With a beer that is 1.095, as mine was, you have to hit all your targets.
So I used every trick in my arsenal to get the yeast happy. I used A LOT of yeast, to begin with (well it looked like a lot to me, Mr. Malty said that's what I needed). And I did everything I could to make it happy. I added yeast nutrient. I aerated until my arms hurt, I made a starter with warmth and aeration, I pitched a little warm to let the yeast propagate before it hits target temp. And I played it some good music to boot. :) In short I did everything I could to try to make my yeast happy.
Given all that, I was disheartened to look in on the beer last evening and discover that the temperature, which was suppose to be around 18C, had dropped to 16.5. True, it was still well within the Ale temperature rate, but I knew that especially with this kind of wort, you don't want the kind of under-performance that you'd get with lower temperature. Typically, at this stage, the internal heat produced by the fermentation would be enough to keep the temperature up, but for some reason, it wasn't happening this time. Never daunted, I pulled out my handy-dandy heat wrap and set it on the fermentor. Within the hour the temperature was back were it was suppose to be. Yet my heart was heavy: I had just gotten the heat wrap, and had not yet had a chance to attach the temperature controller to it, so I knew I couldn't leave it in the fermentation fridge over night. I was worried that the temperature would drop again, and the yeast would be unhappy.
Turns out I needn't have worried. When I woke up this morning, the temperature reading was 18.2. Apparently fermentation had started in earnest and the wort was warming itself. I could also tell it was going well because I could smell it from across the room. Delighted, I opened the fridge to look at the beer, and was astounded: The fermentor had turned into a volcanic irruption. There was thick krausen covering the outside of the demijohn on all sides, and the lid had blown completely off and was resting in the corner of the fridge. It was amazing. It gave the words "High Krausen" a whole new meaning. It was a great sight to get up to in the morning (I think only a beer-geek can get excited at the sight of a sticky mess like this. But some messes ARE highly exciting.)
Well, as exciting as it was, it did need to be cleaned up. And given the high gravity of the wort, it was clear that I would not be top cropping this yeast, so preserving it was not much of an issue. I grabber a sterilized ladle (Blow torches are so handy in these cases, aren't they?) and a plastic container and ladled all the stuff of the fermentor. I grabbed the lid, scrubbed it of dried yeast, sanitized it and placed it back on top. And then I cleaned the sides. All in all, I think I collected enough yeast during cleanup to ferment a good size batch of small beer. Sadly, it was all going in the drain, but still pretty amazing to see.
Before I left for work, I took another look in the fridge. There was already a new spur of yeast driving down the side of the fermentor. I'm guessing I'm in for another round of cleaning tonight. I don't mind though. If nothing else, it gave me an idea for a name for this beer. I'm going to call it McGeyzer ;)
Showing posts with label warming your beer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label warming your beer. Show all posts
Monday, January 2, 2012
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
It's (not) getting hot in here
Aside from the general prerequisites of pots, tuns, ingredients, water, and general mayhem, the The Three Cats Brewery features, well, three cats. Those wild, furry, semi-domesticated predators who love to poke a paw at a running tap of sanitizer and flip over a jar full of yeast. Generally, the cats don't actually impact the brewing process much (aside for extra vigilance about cat hair). But they do have one annoying habit: They go to the bathroom quite a lot, which means that they need to get out to the porch (where the sandbox is located) on a regular basis.
I am telling you all of this as a way of explaining why it is that even at the dead of winter we leave the door to the porch ajar. And why, consequently, the temperature in our house routinely dips into the teens. Ordinarily, this is not much of a problem: We own a large number of blankets and warm cloths, and we keep the young brew-mistress on us regularly, so we all stay warm. But you can't put a blanket on a fermentation bucket (well, you can, but it wont do anything), and at night when we turn the heat off the temperature in the living room where I keep the fermentation fridge does drop substantially. So if I want to maintain my yeast happy and active, I need to use that other function on my temperature controller and warm the beer.
In talking to fellow brewers about this I came up with several ways you can warm a fermenting beer in a fridge. You warm it in a fridge because it's a small and insulated space that you can easily control, and because if you set your heating and cooling at the same place, you don't have to move the beer when the weather changes.
The first method is to use a space-heater or a blow-dryer. You install the thing in your fridge (preferably instead of the vegetable drawer) and plug it into your PID controller. Simple and straight forward. The only problem is that a space-heater, by definition, is not designed to be used in a small confined space (like a fridge) and requires a free flow of air or it gets very overheated. Plus, there's just something about the idea of putting a heater inside my fridge that sets my teeth of edge. I know people do this, and it works, but it still feels like a recipe for trouble.
Second is using a lamp. A regular, 100W light-bulb can produce enough heat to warm an average-sized fridge. There are two problems with this method. One, it is highly inefficient, since the heat is not directed, you must heat the whole volume of the fridge, which means running the bulb for rather a long time every time you open the door of the fridge. The second problem with this method is that the bulb doesn't just produce heat, but also (or rather, mainly) it produces light. Light is bad for beer. (More precisely, it is bad for the hop oils in the beer). And seeing as most of us use buckets or carboys that are light-permeable, long exposure to light is not an optimal solution.
Third is using a heat lamp. Like this: http://www.petplanet.co.il/product.asp?id=654 This is a ceramic terrarium heat lamp that produces the heat without the light. The downside is that it is fairly expensive.
Fourth is using a commercial product, like this one: http://morebeer.com/view_product/16674/102282/The_FermWrap_Heater Nice and elegant. But requires shipping from abroad.
A nice compromise that we came up with during the discussion is to use a regular light bulb (option two) which is mounted instead of the vegetable drawer, and then covering the bottom shelf of the fridge with aluminum foil to keep light from reaching the fermentor. This is definitely a workable option, as it deals with the one major drawback of heating with a light bulb. However, I feel that this is a very wasteful proposition, since the foil will also reflect a certain amount of infrared (heat) radiation, further reducing the efficiency of an already inefficient system. This is an inherent problem of all of the solutions that heat up the whole fridge space: They heat up rather more air than is strictly required to warm the beer, and are therefore inefficient.
At the end, I've decided to go with option four (the heat wrap). It has several important advantages that, in my view, justify the initial investment:
I am telling you all of this as a way of explaining why it is that even at the dead of winter we leave the door to the porch ajar. And why, consequently, the temperature in our house routinely dips into the teens. Ordinarily, this is not much of a problem: We own a large number of blankets and warm cloths, and we keep the young brew-mistress on us regularly, so we all stay warm. But you can't put a blanket on a fermentation bucket (well, you can, but it wont do anything), and at night when we turn the heat off the temperature in the living room where I keep the fermentation fridge does drop substantially. So if I want to maintain my yeast happy and active, I need to use that other function on my temperature controller and warm the beer.
In talking to fellow brewers about this I came up with several ways you can warm a fermenting beer in a fridge. You warm it in a fridge because it's a small and insulated space that you can easily control, and because if you set your heating and cooling at the same place, you don't have to move the beer when the weather changes.
The first method is to use a space-heater or a blow-dryer. You install the thing in your fridge (preferably instead of the vegetable drawer) and plug it into your PID controller. Simple and straight forward. The only problem is that a space-heater, by definition, is not designed to be used in a small confined space (like a fridge) and requires a free flow of air or it gets very overheated. Plus, there's just something about the idea of putting a heater inside my fridge that sets my teeth of edge. I know people do this, and it works, but it still feels like a recipe for trouble.
Second is using a lamp. A regular, 100W light-bulb can produce enough heat to warm an average-sized fridge. There are two problems with this method. One, it is highly inefficient, since the heat is not directed, you must heat the whole volume of the fridge, which means running the bulb for rather a long time every time you open the door of the fridge. The second problem with this method is that the bulb doesn't just produce heat, but also (or rather, mainly) it produces light. Light is bad for beer. (More precisely, it is bad for the hop oils in the beer). And seeing as most of us use buckets or carboys that are light-permeable, long exposure to light is not an optimal solution.
Third is using a heat lamp. Like this: http://www.petplanet.co.il/product.asp?id=654 This is a ceramic terrarium heat lamp that produces the heat without the light. The downside is that it is fairly expensive.
Fourth is using a commercial product, like this one: http://morebeer.com/view_product/16674/102282/The_FermWrap_Heater Nice and elegant. But requires shipping from abroad.
A nice compromise that we came up with during the discussion is to use a regular light bulb (option two) which is mounted instead of the vegetable drawer, and then covering the bottom shelf of the fridge with aluminum foil to keep light from reaching the fermentor. This is definitely a workable option, as it deals with the one major drawback of heating with a light bulb. However, I feel that this is a very wasteful proposition, since the foil will also reflect a certain amount of infrared (heat) radiation, further reducing the efficiency of an already inefficient system. This is an inherent problem of all of the solutions that heat up the whole fridge space: They heat up rather more air than is strictly required to warm the beer, and are therefore inefficient.
At the end, I've decided to go with option four (the heat wrap). It has several important advantages that, in my view, justify the initial investment:
- It is efficient. At 40W, this this will nonetheless heat faster than a 100W light-bulb, meaning that it not only draws less power, it will also draw it for shorter times.
- It is environmentally independent. I can open the fridge door and let cold air in, and the beer will remain at constant temp. In fact, I can set the fridge temp lower (say to lager fermentation temp) and let a lager ferment in one side of the fridge while an ale is keeping warm right next to it.
- It is scalable. I generally only brew one beer at a time, but this product can actually be used to warm two fermentors side-by-side if I so choose.
- It is portable. I can take it to the basement (where the temp ranges from 12 to 14 degrees in this time of year) and let it keep a fermenting secondary from getting too cold down there.
- It is cheap. At $30 plus free shipping, it is actually cheaper than the terrarium lamp. Luckily I have family who is coming from the States soon and would be able to hand-deliver the thing to my door, so I don't pay for overseas shipping charges.
- It is safe to use in small, insulated environments. MoreBeer actually sell carboy bags you can use to insulate this thing. Makes me feel better knowing that this thing is not going to burst into flames.
- It is made for this application. This may seem trivial, considering how many times we homebrewers bastardize pieces of equipment that were designed for something else to use in brewing (laundry pumps and wort-chillers made out of copper tubing are just two examples of this). But given a ready-made, reasonably-priced, specifically-engineered, product that is built for our needs, I see no reason not to take advantage of it.
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