I made a comment to a facebook post earlier today about saving yeast from a smack pack. A previous commentator admonished the owner of said smack pack to wash the yeast for re-use once he had brewed the beer. I commented and said that there's no reason to wash the yeast, since you could just save a portion of the starter and re-cuture. I then got yelled at that you "don't save a piece of any starter, certainly not of lager." Seemed to me like a good chance to crunch some numbers.
So lets start with the basics. Why do we build a starter to begin with? Well, it's because we need a certain number of yeast cells to insure a healthy fermentation and, dang it, the yeast we get from the store just isn't enough. Let's take the case of my friend's brew as a test subject: He's planning to brew a fairly strong lager, so let's assume he's starting with an OG of 1.060. Using the handy-dandy Mr. Malty pitching rate calculator I find that I need no less than 439 Million yeast cells.
Now, given that the average yeast vial or smack pack is suppose to have about 100 Million cells in it, it would take four of them to pitch a proper pitch. But the fact is that yeast dies in transit, and over time the viability of that vial degrades. If I'm really lucky, and the vial was transported cold, and was very fresh when it was bought, and I pitched it right away, I might get about 40% viability. So of that theoretical 100 Million cells, I have about 40 Million to work with. Mr Malty doesn't tell me how big of a starter I'd need for that, but yeastcalc.com does: it would take a 12 liter starter to make enough yeast for this beer. For those following at home, we're talking about a 18.9 Liter brew.
The reason it takes so much starter wort to generate this much yeast is that growth is not liner to starter size. In other words, a 2 Liter starter will not propagate twice as many cells as a 1 Liter starter. It's the law of diminishing returns, on a cellular level.
So how do you make that much yeast? Well, you try to always pitch as much yeast as would hit the optimal growth rate for that size starter. In other words, the more starter wort you have, the more yeast you need to pitch. Or, flip it, the more yeast you have, the larger a starter you can pitch it to. This is called making a step-up starter.
So lets take our 40 Million cells that we got in the smack pack, pitch them into a 1 liter starter, and throw it on a stir plate until it ferments out. At the end of fermentation, our yeast has grown to about 139 Million cells (according to yeastcalc). Now lets do it again, take those 139 Million, and pitch them into 2 Liters (more yeast means bigger starter, right?) let it ferment and we get 377 Million cells. Getting close to the target, but not quite there. So lets do it one more time, and pitch into a 3L starter. At the end of that cycle we get...ready for this?...a whooping 779 Million cells! WAAAAY more than we need. In matter of fact, if we took that 3 Liter starter, mixed it well, and pitched only 1.75 liters of it into the wort, we will hit our target rate almost exactly. And the rest? That's enough yeast slurry there to fill a couple of vials and share with friends, and we've made it using half of the starter it would have taken in a single-step starter.
So yes, you can save a portion of the starter and re-culture it. in fact, if you do your step-up right, you probably wont need to re-culture. You'll have enough ready to use yeast that you can pitch what you need and save the rest. So get starting!
Showing posts with label yeast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yeast. Show all posts
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Monday, June 11, 2012
Let's get started
I'm a big believer in making yeast starters for my beers. I use a fair amount of liquid yeast which sometimes goes a couple of months between pitches, so making a step-up starter to verify viability and propagate a good pitch of the yeast is key.
Recently I did something stupid: I killed most of my yeast.
I usually store my yeast in the house refrigerator which, unlike my fermentation fridge, is kept at a constant (and cold) temperature. I typically keep the yeast in the back of the bottom shelf, which is the coldest, and also most out of the way place in the fridge, and it's fine there. However, a couple of months ago I had to move the yeast out while cleaning the fridge for Passover (The yeast itself is kosher, but the beer it's in is not) and so I put it in the fermentation fridge. I figured that since I had a lager lagering in there at the time it was probably fine to keep the yeast in there for a while. (And it probably was).
The stupid thing I did was not moving the yeast back into the house fridge after Passover. And furthermore, fermenting an ale in there after the lager, causing the temps in the fridge to shift from 4C to 20C in short order, and keep around 20C for a couple of weeks, before dropping them back down to 8C at the end of fermentation. So yeah, turns out that violent temperature swings and hot temps kill yeast. Duh...
Actually, that's not quite true: These conditions kill older yeast. Yeast that has been recently used, on the other hand, has a pretty good chance of surviving. Problem is, you don't know what survived and what didn't until you try to use it, which is where yeast starters come in. Over the past month I've been making small starters and painstakingly pitching vials of yeast to see what survived and what didn't. The results are, sadly, pretty grim. I've lost a number of strains I can not replace, including my favorite English strain, which was a real issue since I was going to brew an ESB, and I needed yeast. My dry yeast of choice for an ESB is Dunstar Windsor, which unfortunately my LHBS doesn't carry. Luckily, I discovered an old package in the back of the fermentation fridge.
But now comes the tricky question: Did the yeast survive? It was exposed to the same conditions that killed my other yeast and while it was dry, it was also quite an old package. I decided to take the unusual step and actually do a starter for my dry yeast.
The result was spectacular. Within less than an hour of pitching the yeast into 300ml of 1.040 wort, it had foam and very active fermentation. Clearly the yeast was alive and well (I take this as a sign of the quality of Dunstar products). I let it finish and put it in the fridge until I was ready for it. On brewing day I took it out to let it warm up, and started brewing as usual. After mashing and boiling for 15 minutes I drew about a liter of unhopped wort (I boil for 90 min, so I hadn't gotten to the first hop addition yet) cooled it, and pitched the yeast into it (having first decanted most of the spent liquid). My thinking is that if I'm going to pitch a starter at high krausen, as oppose to letting finish and decanting the spent liquid (my usual technique) then the liquid should resemble my actual beer as much as possible. Clearly they are not identical (the started is not hopped) but they have the same malt profile, which is not bad. I continued brewing as usual, cooled, and pitched the slurry.
Fermentation started within hours. High Krausen within less then 24 hours. By 40 the krausen has fallen. I don't think I've ever seen a beer move so fast. It was so fast, in fact, that my fridge was having a hard time keeping up, and the fermentation temperature ended up at 21C instead of 20C. Not terrible, but a little disconcerting. I was very glad to have left as much head space as I did in the fermentor, as I'm sure I would have had a spill otherwise.
So now it's slowing down and doing its thing. I think I'll give this beer a while at fermentation temps to make sure it re-uptakes some of the extra esters the fermentation must have produced, and possible let it lager a bit for extra clarity and conditioning. Next time I'll be more prepared and set my fermentation fridge a little lower to compensate. I think this will be an interesting beer. And if it turns out OK, I'll bring it with me on August 2nd for everyone to taste. :)
Recently I did something stupid: I killed most of my yeast.
I usually store my yeast in the house refrigerator which, unlike my fermentation fridge, is kept at a constant (and cold) temperature. I typically keep the yeast in the back of the bottom shelf, which is the coldest, and also most out of the way place in the fridge, and it's fine there. However, a couple of months ago I had to move the yeast out while cleaning the fridge for Passover (The yeast itself is kosher, but the beer it's in is not) and so I put it in the fermentation fridge. I figured that since I had a lager lagering in there at the time it was probably fine to keep the yeast in there for a while. (And it probably was).
The stupid thing I did was not moving the yeast back into the house fridge after Passover. And furthermore, fermenting an ale in there after the lager, causing the temps in the fridge to shift from 4C to 20C in short order, and keep around 20C for a couple of weeks, before dropping them back down to 8C at the end of fermentation. So yeah, turns out that violent temperature swings and hot temps kill yeast. Duh...
Actually, that's not quite true: These conditions kill older yeast. Yeast that has been recently used, on the other hand, has a pretty good chance of surviving. Problem is, you don't know what survived and what didn't until you try to use it, which is where yeast starters come in. Over the past month I've been making small starters and painstakingly pitching vials of yeast to see what survived and what didn't. The results are, sadly, pretty grim. I've lost a number of strains I can not replace, including my favorite English strain, which was a real issue since I was going to brew an ESB, and I needed yeast. My dry yeast of choice for an ESB is Dunstar Windsor, which unfortunately my LHBS doesn't carry. Luckily, I discovered an old package in the back of the fermentation fridge.
But now comes the tricky question: Did the yeast survive? It was exposed to the same conditions that killed my other yeast and while it was dry, it was also quite an old package. I decided to take the unusual step and actually do a starter for my dry yeast.
The result was spectacular. Within less than an hour of pitching the yeast into 300ml of 1.040 wort, it had foam and very active fermentation. Clearly the yeast was alive and well (I take this as a sign of the quality of Dunstar products). I let it finish and put it in the fridge until I was ready for it. On brewing day I took it out to let it warm up, and started brewing as usual. After mashing and boiling for 15 minutes I drew about a liter of unhopped wort (I boil for 90 min, so I hadn't gotten to the first hop addition yet) cooled it, and pitched the yeast into it (having first decanted most of the spent liquid). My thinking is that if I'm going to pitch a starter at high krausen, as oppose to letting finish and decanting the spent liquid (my usual technique) then the liquid should resemble my actual beer as much as possible. Clearly they are not identical (the started is not hopped) but they have the same malt profile, which is not bad. I continued brewing as usual, cooled, and pitched the slurry.
Fermentation started within hours. High Krausen within less then 24 hours. By 40 the krausen has fallen. I don't think I've ever seen a beer move so fast. It was so fast, in fact, that my fridge was having a hard time keeping up, and the fermentation temperature ended up at 21C instead of 20C. Not terrible, but a little disconcerting. I was very glad to have left as much head space as I did in the fermentor, as I'm sure I would have had a spill otherwise.
So now it's slowing down and doing its thing. I think I'll give this beer a while at fermentation temps to make sure it re-uptakes some of the extra esters the fermentation must have produced, and possible let it lager a bit for extra clarity and conditioning. Next time I'll be more prepared and set my fermentation fridge a little lower to compensate. I think this will be an interesting beer. And if it turns out OK, I'll bring it with me on August 2nd for everyone to taste. :)
Monday, January 9, 2012
Cold Crashing
As home-brewers we do not, as a rule, filter our beers. And so it becomes an article of pride for many of us to have beer that is unfiltered, and yet crystal clear. We like the yeast, we use it to turn our wort into beer, and then we would like it to sink down as quickly as possible and leave our beer clear and transparent.
One of the methods that we use to achieve this lofty goal is Cold Crashing.Cold crashing is a process by which we take the beer once it's done fermenting, and abruptly drop the temperature in the fermentor from the blissful 17-21C of ale fermentation to a blistering 4C for about two days. (Lager, being laggered at 4C anyway is not cold crashed. Or if you will, Cold crash is part of its basic process.) The idea is that the yeast will become dormant and flocculate out of the beer, leaving it clear. A secondary use of cold crashing is to stop fermentation before it is complete, in order to leave more sugar in the beer and a lower alcohol content. (This is kind of a misconception, since you don't stop fermentation, you suspend it, and the yeast will take it back up if you raise the temperature again)
Personally, I can never bring myself to cold crash a beer, and instead I prefer a slower process in which I drop the temperature by about 1 degree C every 12 hours, for about a week. This is enough to bring me from 18 degrees to 4. It just takes longer.
The reason I do it this way is because of what happens to yeast when it gets stressed. When yeast gets stressed (such as, when the temperature changes abruptly) it produces a variety of stress compounds in the form of phenols and other off-flavor chemicals. It's rather like a human being that's suddenly been confronted with a stressful situation: These chemicals are the yeast equivalent of cold sweat. By gradually reducing the temperature in small increments I strive to minimize this effect by letting the yeast acclimate and fall asleep gently, rather than shocking them into a comma.
Is this a better approach than cold crashing? I have no idea. I have heard claims that when you cold crash your yeast falls asleep so fast that it doesn't have time to produce off-flavors in significant quantities. I don't know. One of these days I may try this: Take a batch, split it in two, and let half cool in the house fridge (at 4C) while I cool the other half slowly. It will be interesting to see the difference.
My philosophy of brewing is that you can't rush good beer, and therefore you should avoid doing anything abrupt to it. This is a luxury that we, as home brewers, have over commercial brewers. We can afford to wait the extra few days. We can age a beer for a year before we crack open the first bottle. We can experiment much more readily with our 20 liter batches than they can with their 200 or 2000 Liter batches. Given all that, it seems only natural to avoid doing something fast and brutal to your yeast, and prefer instead a slower, gentler process. But then, that may just be me.
One of the methods that we use to achieve this lofty goal is Cold Crashing.Cold crashing is a process by which we take the beer once it's done fermenting, and abruptly drop the temperature in the fermentor from the blissful 17-21C of ale fermentation to a blistering 4C for about two days. (Lager, being laggered at 4C anyway is not cold crashed. Or if you will, Cold crash is part of its basic process.) The idea is that the yeast will become dormant and flocculate out of the beer, leaving it clear. A secondary use of cold crashing is to stop fermentation before it is complete, in order to leave more sugar in the beer and a lower alcohol content. (This is kind of a misconception, since you don't stop fermentation, you suspend it, and the yeast will take it back up if you raise the temperature again)
Personally, I can never bring myself to cold crash a beer, and instead I prefer a slower process in which I drop the temperature by about 1 degree C every 12 hours, for about a week. This is enough to bring me from 18 degrees to 4. It just takes longer.
The reason I do it this way is because of what happens to yeast when it gets stressed. When yeast gets stressed (such as, when the temperature changes abruptly) it produces a variety of stress compounds in the form of phenols and other off-flavor chemicals. It's rather like a human being that's suddenly been confronted with a stressful situation: These chemicals are the yeast equivalent of cold sweat. By gradually reducing the temperature in small increments I strive to minimize this effect by letting the yeast acclimate and fall asleep gently, rather than shocking them into a comma.
Is this a better approach than cold crashing? I have no idea. I have heard claims that when you cold crash your yeast falls asleep so fast that it doesn't have time to produce off-flavors in significant quantities. I don't know. One of these days I may try this: Take a batch, split it in two, and let half cool in the house fridge (at 4C) while I cool the other half slowly. It will be interesting to see the difference.
My philosophy of brewing is that you can't rush good beer, and therefore you should avoid doing anything abrupt to it. This is a luxury that we, as home brewers, have over commercial brewers. We can afford to wait the extra few days. We can age a beer for a year before we crack open the first bottle. We can experiment much more readily with our 20 liter batches than they can with their 200 or 2000 Liter batches. Given all that, it seems only natural to avoid doing something fast and brutal to your yeast, and prefer instead a slower, gentler process. But then, that may just be me.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Things you see in the light of morn
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 ;)
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 ;)
Monday, December 12, 2011
Dry yeast to Liquid yeast table
I had a discussion with a fellow homebrewer some time ago, where he claimed that dry yeast is as good as liquid yeast, and that it can produce equally good beer. I argued to him that it sounded unreasonable to think that you can substitute the dozens of liquid strains available with the handful of dry strains and expect the same results, and in response he sent me to do some reading.
Well I did some reading, and it turns out, we were both right. There are, in fact dozens (if not hundreds) of yeast strains out there. Each differing in flavor profile, attenuation, flocculation, temperature range and other factors, and indeed most of them produce different results (to a lesser or greater extent) than the dried yeast that is suppose to substitute them. However, there do appear to be certain strains that are the "major players" in the world of yeast, and that are the strain of choice for a large number of beers. Many of those appear to also be available in dried form. In fact, it appears that most dried yeast available today is a dry form of well known liquid strains.
So I compiled a little table of dry yeast and the liquid yeast from which it is derived. This is not an equivalence table - there are many more strains that you can substitute a given strain of dry yeast for and get acceptable results. The strains in this table are supposedly identical, or nearly identical to the liquid form.
A couple of caveats:
1. Like any form of processing, drying subtly changes the yeast. So while the strains are supposedly identical, there may be slight variations in profile, lag time, etc.
2. Since the information here was compiled from several different sources, and is sometimes based on opinions and educated guesses it varies in reliability. Those strains for which confidence is not high, or that there is debate about the exact strain of are marked with a question mark.
Fermentis:
US-05 - WYST1056 - WLP001
US-04 - WYST1098/1099? - WLP007
K-97+ - Wyeast 1007? - WLP320?/036?
WB-06 - WYST3333 - WLP380 - Weihenstephan 66?
T-58 - WYST3724/1214? - WLP565/500? - Chimay? / Saison Dupont
S-23 - WYST2001?/2206? - WLP800?/820? *
S-189+ - ? - WLP885 - Samichlaus
W34/70 - WYST2124 - WLP830 - Weihenstephan 34/70
Danstar:
Nottingham - WYST? - WLP039
Windsor - WYST1928?/1068? -WLP002
Munich - WYST3638 - WLP351 **
Coopers:
CoopersAle - ? - WLP-009
Mutons:
Mutons ale - WYST1968? - WLP-002 ***
+ Yeast is marketed as "Craft Brewing" yeast (as oppose to home brewing) and may not be available in small packets
* S-23 Seems to change its character depending on brewing temp. Fermenting clean at about 60F, and fruity at around 50F
**Danstar Munich is reputed to be the same strain as 3638/351, but the drying process tends to result in a less phenolic profile
***For an opinion on Mutons yeast I will refer you to Finn Hill Brewing Blog, which I feel has summarized the yeast well: http://finnhillbrewing.blogspot.com/2010/12/dry-yeast-conversion-chart.html see comments below the chart.
I'll welcome any additions and contributions to the chart. I've primarily focused on yeasts available in Israel, but if anyone wants to add international yeasts, I'd be happy to.
Well I did some reading, and it turns out, we were both right. There are, in fact dozens (if not hundreds) of yeast strains out there. Each differing in flavor profile, attenuation, flocculation, temperature range and other factors, and indeed most of them produce different results (to a lesser or greater extent) than the dried yeast that is suppose to substitute them. However, there do appear to be certain strains that are the "major players" in the world of yeast, and that are the strain of choice for a large number of beers. Many of those appear to also be available in dried form. In fact, it appears that most dried yeast available today is a dry form of well known liquid strains.
So I compiled a little table of dry yeast and the liquid yeast from which it is derived. This is not an equivalence table - there are many more strains that you can substitute a given strain of dry yeast for and get acceptable results. The strains in this table are supposedly identical, or nearly identical to the liquid form.
A couple of caveats:
1. Like any form of processing, drying subtly changes the yeast. So while the strains are supposedly identical, there may be slight variations in profile, lag time, etc.
2. Since the information here was compiled from several different sources, and is sometimes based on opinions and educated guesses it varies in reliability. Those strains for which confidence is not high, or that there is debate about the exact strain of are marked with a question mark.
Fermentis:
US-05 - WYST1056 - WLP001
US-04 - WYST1098/1099? - WLP007
K-97+ - Wyeast 1007? - WLP320?/036?
WB-06 - WYST3333 - WLP380 - Weihenstephan 66?
T-58 - WYST3724/1214? - WLP565/500? - Chimay? / Saison Dupont
S-23 - WYST2001?/2206? - WLP800?/820? *
S-189+ - ? - WLP885 - Samichlaus
W34/70 - WYST2124 - WLP830 - Weihenstephan 34/70
Danstar:
Nottingham - WYST? - WLP039
Windsor - WYST1928?/1068? -WLP002
Munich - WYST3638 - WLP351 **
Coopers:
CoopersAle - ? - WLP-009
Mutons:
Mutons ale - WYST1968? - WLP-002 ***
+ Yeast is marketed as "Craft Brewing" yeast (as oppose to home brewing) and may not be available in small packets
* S-23 Seems to change its character depending on brewing temp. Fermenting clean at about 60F, and fruity at around 50F
**Danstar Munich is reputed to be the same strain as 3638/351, but the drying process tends to result in a less phenolic profile
***For an opinion on Mutons yeast I will refer you to Finn Hill Brewing Blog, which I feel has summarized the yeast well: http://finnhillbrewing.blogspot.com/2010/12/dry-yeast-conversion-chart.html see comments below the chart.
I'll welcome any additions and contributions to the chart. I've primarily focused on yeasts available in Israel, but if anyone wants to add international yeasts, I'd be happy to.
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.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
I am the Lord thy G-d... Sorta..
On some level, a brewer is a sort of a yeast god. Taking the infant yeast from their little Eden in a test-tube or packet and casting it into a world flowing with maltose and oxygen with the commandant "be fruitful and multiply!". We seek tribute from our creations in the form of alcohols, CO2, and flavors, and threaten damnation down the drain if they misbehave.
Of course yeast, unlike human, are kinda stupid and simple. Having only a single cell and a mare sixteen sets of chromosomes to the human 23, they haven't quite evolved complex skills such as language and writing. If you want yeast to do something, you have to give them the conditions to do it. One thing we as brewers often want from our yeast is to grow into more yeast. To do this we must give them two main things: Food (in the form of maltose and other complex sugars) and Air (Oxygen). Like most organisms, yeast will use up air long before they ran out of food. So if we are trying to get them to keep growing and multiplying we have to give them more and more Oxygen. In a yeast Starter (the place which we most want the yeast to multiply) we do this by shaking the beaker regularly or, preferably, by putting it on a stir plate where it can have a regular supply.
All of this is by way of long-winded introduction to the fact that I decided that I really want a stir plate at home so I can make good starter. Unfortunately, a basic stir plate in this country costs about 800NIS (over $200US), so I wasn't going to buy one. I decided to build one instead.
Building a stir plat is actually quite easy. All it involves is finding a computer cooling fan, sticking a couple of magnets on it, connecting it to an appropriate power source, and building a housing over the whole thing. I built my stir plate based on a page-long instruction which I found on a brewing forum. I wont share the the link here, as the instructions were not very good. The electronics were overly complicated and it lacked some important details. Instead I will tell you that there are plenty of YouTube videos about this, and they're fairly comprehensive.
This is the finished product. You can see the strong magnets mounted on the computer fan. They are the ones that engage the stir stick inside the Erlenmeyer flask that actually does the stirring. The whole thing is mounted in a makeshift enclosure that I built out of spare wood and clear plastic, and I use a variable resistor to control the speed of the fan and the speed of the stirring. Total cost for this fully functional plate: 6.80Nis for the Teflon-coated stir stick (Just under $2US).
Here's the stir plate in action. Screws all set and balanced, and the stir stick engaged. if you look carefully you can see that the wort inside is spinning and is pulling a nice vortex. Mission accomplished. The yeast can go forth and multiply.
There are a lot of random pieces of equipment involved in our craft. I have seen brewers make fermentors out of some mighty weird containers, build wort chillers out of garden hoses and copper tubing, bastardize laundry machine pumps and use innovation and creativity to create an endless array of useful appliances. It is one of the greatest aspects of our hobby, I think. We don't just make beer, we make the things that make things happen. We create the world in which water, air, and sugar combine to make a little drop of heaven for our yeast, and it rewards us with beer. We are yeast gods.
Of course yeast, unlike human, are kinda stupid and simple. Having only a single cell and a mare sixteen sets of chromosomes to the human 23, they haven't quite evolved complex skills such as language and writing. If you want yeast to do something, you have to give them the conditions to do it. One thing we as brewers often want from our yeast is to grow into more yeast. To do this we must give them two main things: Food (in the form of maltose and other complex sugars) and Air (Oxygen). Like most organisms, yeast will use up air long before they ran out of food. So if we are trying to get them to keep growing and multiplying we have to give them more and more Oxygen. In a yeast Starter (the place which we most want the yeast to multiply) we do this by shaking the beaker regularly or, preferably, by putting it on a stir plate where it can have a regular supply.
All of this is by way of long-winded introduction to the fact that I decided that I really want a stir plate at home so I can make good starter. Unfortunately, a basic stir plate in this country costs about 800NIS (over $200US), so I wasn't going to buy one. I decided to build one instead.
Building a stir plat is actually quite easy. All it involves is finding a computer cooling fan, sticking a couple of magnets on it, connecting it to an appropriate power source, and building a housing over the whole thing. I built my stir plate based on a page-long instruction which I found on a brewing forum. I wont share the the link here, as the instructions were not very good. The electronics were overly complicated and it lacked some important details. Instead I will tell you that there are plenty of YouTube videos about this, and they're fairly comprehensive.
This is the finished product. You can see the strong magnets mounted on the computer fan. They are the ones that engage the stir stick inside the Erlenmeyer flask that actually does the stirring. The whole thing is mounted in a makeshift enclosure that I built out of spare wood and clear plastic, and I use a variable resistor to control the speed of the fan and the speed of the stirring. Total cost for this fully functional plate: 6.80Nis for the Teflon-coated stir stick (Just under $2US).
Here's the stir plate in action. Screws all set and balanced, and the stir stick engaged. if you look carefully you can see that the wort inside is spinning and is pulling a nice vortex. Mission accomplished. The yeast can go forth and multiply.
There are a lot of random pieces of equipment involved in our craft. I have seen brewers make fermentors out of some mighty weird containers, build wort chillers out of garden hoses and copper tubing, bastardize laundry machine pumps and use innovation and creativity to create an endless array of useful appliances. It is one of the greatest aspects of our hobby, I think. We don't just make beer, we make the things that make things happen. We create the world in which water, air, and sugar combine to make a little drop of heaven for our yeast, and it rewards us with beer. We are yeast gods.
Monday, October 31, 2011
The future is now (but not here)
When you read homebrewing books that were published in the US, you can't but think that we are living in the golden age of home brewing. Material and tools that were previously only available in commercial applications have permeated the home brew market, and resulted in an explosion of styles and creativity. Yeast strains from commercial breweries are readily available; plumbing, fake bottoms, cam locks, and pre-made wort chillers can be easily purchased at reasonable prices; specialty malts and extracts, rice hulls, acids and sugars are stocked by any self-respecting HBS. Life is good.
And then you look at our local market in Israel. I recently found a challenging recipe for a beer from 100% wheat malt. If I were in the States this would not be a problem: I'd get my grain, mix in about half a kilo of rice hulls, and sparge as I always do. But in Israel you can not get rice hulls anywhere, and even if you could, you'd still be limited to the handful of dried yeast varieties we have. You could try to make the beer out of wheat extract instead - it would save you the potential for stuck sparge. But the chances of getting fresh wheat extract in this country depend on fostering a close relationship with your local brew store, and catching them at exactly the right time - the once or twice a year that they order wheat extract. A lot of extra effort, and besides, who wants to brew extract?
Actually, I would love to brew extract. More precisely: I would love to still be brewing extract, and looking forward to moving to All Grain in the future. It's a much gentler introduction to brewing than to jump right into AG from your second brew on like I did, simply because my local store didn't have extract in stock. I later learned that "local" HBS only applies if you live in the Tel Aviv metro area. For everyone else, there's a choice of car or shipping, or just dealing with the limited supplies and low turnover of "sales points".
Some of this deficiency in selection is understandable: Liquid yeast, for example, is hard to transport, expensive, and requires a kosher seal (though I'm not sure why. If you're not satisfied with the kashrut, don't buy it). So it is too much of a pain to import for such a small market as ours. But some of this is the result of a product Catch-22: Nobody imports rice hulls because there's no demand for them. And there's no demand for them because no one uses them in brewing (because no one imports them).
This is where the onus is on our local suppliers to introduce new products to the market even if they don't make money on them right away. Someone should import rice hulls, I will be the first to buy them, I promise you. And because I'm lazy, if I found one store that sales rice hulls I'd order my entire bill grain from there, even if they weren't my regular store. And I'm not alone in that: A store that introduces new products to the market regularly, even at a potential loss, will benefit from more clients and improved sales in the long run. We're not too good at taking the long view in this country, unfortunately, but I'm hoping someone will pick up the glove.
It's not all bad, though. The lack of certain products, tools, and aids forces us to be creative: Someone pointed out to me that BIAB doesn't suffer from stuck sparges. That is something I will keep in mind, and when the day comes when I decide to brew my all-wheat beer this is how I will do it. It's not the regular way I brew, but it is another tool in my brewing toolbox which I can use. When I get tired of using dry yeast, I will turn to culturing my own liquid yeast out of bottles and samples of liquid yeast hand delivered by friends from other countries. It's a lot more of a pain, but ultimately it will make me a better brewer.
And at the end of the day, there's always hope. Twenty years ago home brewing in the States wasn't nearly as easy or prolific as it is today. One can hope that as home brewing in Israel takes off the situation will improve here as well. And it already has: In the last ten years the availability of malts, yeasts, and equipment in this country took a huge leap forward. Hopefully we will eventually catch up the the US in that field. Hopefully it will not take twenty years to do so.
And then you look at our local market in Israel. I recently found a challenging recipe for a beer from 100% wheat malt. If I were in the States this would not be a problem: I'd get my grain, mix in about half a kilo of rice hulls, and sparge as I always do. But in Israel you can not get rice hulls anywhere, and even if you could, you'd still be limited to the handful of dried yeast varieties we have. You could try to make the beer out of wheat extract instead - it would save you the potential for stuck sparge. But the chances of getting fresh wheat extract in this country depend on fostering a close relationship with your local brew store, and catching them at exactly the right time - the once or twice a year that they order wheat extract. A lot of extra effort, and besides, who wants to brew extract?
Actually, I would love to brew extract. More precisely: I would love to still be brewing extract, and looking forward to moving to All Grain in the future. It's a much gentler introduction to brewing than to jump right into AG from your second brew on like I did, simply because my local store didn't have extract in stock. I later learned that "local" HBS only applies if you live in the Tel Aviv metro area. For everyone else, there's a choice of car or shipping, or just dealing with the limited supplies and low turnover of "sales points".
Some of this deficiency in selection is understandable: Liquid yeast, for example, is hard to transport, expensive, and requires a kosher seal (though I'm not sure why. If you're not satisfied with the kashrut, don't buy it). So it is too much of a pain to import for such a small market as ours. But some of this is the result of a product Catch-22: Nobody imports rice hulls because there's no demand for them. And there's no demand for them because no one uses them in brewing (because no one imports them).
This is where the onus is on our local suppliers to introduce new products to the market even if they don't make money on them right away. Someone should import rice hulls, I will be the first to buy them, I promise you. And because I'm lazy, if I found one store that sales rice hulls I'd order my entire bill grain from there, even if they weren't my regular store. And I'm not alone in that: A store that introduces new products to the market regularly, even at a potential loss, will benefit from more clients and improved sales in the long run. We're not too good at taking the long view in this country, unfortunately, but I'm hoping someone will pick up the glove.
It's not all bad, though. The lack of certain products, tools, and aids forces us to be creative: Someone pointed out to me that BIAB doesn't suffer from stuck sparges. That is something I will keep in mind, and when the day comes when I decide to brew my all-wheat beer this is how I will do it. It's not the regular way I brew, but it is another tool in my brewing toolbox which I can use. When I get tired of using dry yeast, I will turn to culturing my own liquid yeast out of bottles and samples of liquid yeast hand delivered by friends from other countries. It's a lot more of a pain, but ultimately it will make me a better brewer.
And at the end of the day, there's always hope. Twenty years ago home brewing in the States wasn't nearly as easy or prolific as it is today. One can hope that as home brewing in Israel takes off the situation will improve here as well. And it already has: In the last ten years the availability of malts, yeasts, and equipment in this country took a huge leap forward. Hopefully we will eventually catch up the the US in that field. Hopefully it will not take twenty years to do so.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
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.
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.
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