Tuesday, July 7, 2009

RIP 090602 Geordie Ale

The worst sound in the world is the sound of CO2 ejecting foam from the tap instead of beer.

Looking to another brew day this weekend to replenish the Geordie pipeline. Now that I have two batches of this recipe under my belt, I think I will be better able to judge the results of managing the process more closely. The keyword this time is volume - I'm going to take special care to hit the volume targets for sparge and boil, and to keep the boil up until I am measurably near the 5 gallon mark. I want to see if there's a perceptible difference in the resulting gravity or beer quality.

Looking at the calendar, if I get this one brewed Saturday (the 11th), it will likely be in primary a long time due to upcoming travel. It could conceivably be in primary until the 25th. If so, I will probably keg it at that time without going to secondary. Depending on how tired I am when I get back on the 24th I might do some gelatin fining that night, but I'm not sure that it was required even with the last batch, which was pretty clear already when I moved it to the secondary.

On one hand, this violates the "only change one thing at a time" principle, but on the other hand, I should have been watching the water volume close already, so it's not like that in itself is a process change. The real change will be the 14 day primary only ferment and the omission of the gelatin. I have come to appreciate the one step force carb approach and the way it shaves a week off the schedule.

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