Obstacles and their resolution

 "All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and remembered alike." - Marcus Aurelius

Battling entropy

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" - from the sonnet 'Ozymandias' by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Cider!

Taking a brief hiatus from nuclear stuff...

I had a couple of days off, and decided to make some hard cider.  I thought it would be fun to try, so I will be giving it a shot.

The ingredients are:
5 gallons apple juice from concentrate (I am too cheap to buy 5 gallons of actual apple cider)
4 small cartons of Aspen Cider Spice.  This stuff is awesome; its loaded with sugar, cinammon and orange, that should ferment and add some needed flavors.
4 additional cups of white sugar
1 tsp of baking yeast, dissolved in tap water to activate it.

This *should* be ready around Thanksgiving.  Not having done an apple-juice based fermentation before, I am not certain how long it will take, nor how it will turn out.  I am looking forward to finding out though!

If it doesn't end up going down the drain, I think it will be called "Mark's Hard Cider" :)

 

 

UPDATE:  Interestingly, when you ferment apple juice, no krausen is produced.  Krausen is that foamy substance that floats up out of fermenting beer.  Below is a photo fermenting beer on day 2.  Note the foamy krausen floating on top.

 

 

Below are a couple of photos of fermenting cider on day 2.  No thick krausen, just bubbles. 

 







Home brewing - Yeast

Switching gears for a moment from historical steam turbines...

Yeast are interesting micro-organisms.  They are actually very simple single-cell fungi.  They are pretty cool organisms, because they metabolize sugars and excrete grain alcohol as a waste product.  They also generate carbon dioxide gas, which is released during the fermentation process. 

This gas is also what causes bread to rise and have the spongy texture it has.  Yeast is mixed with the dough, and allowed to eat some of the sugars in the flour.  The bread rises because yeast release bubbles of carbon dioxide gas, which is trapped in pockets in the dough.  This process of converting a flat bread into risen bread is called "Leavening".  Yeast are believed to be one of the earliest domesticated organisms, because 4000 year old bakeries have been unearthed in Egypt that have facilities for baking leavened bread.

In an environment with the proper temperature and nutrients, each generation of yeast eats, multiplies many times, and dies.  This process of eat, multiply, and death continues until they either run out of sugar in their environment, or the concentration of their own waste products finally kills them. 

In this respect yeast aren't a whole lot different than people.  Humans have multiplied to reach 7 Billion people on this little planet.  We have radioactive water seeping into the Pacific Ocean and entering the food chain.  We also have a million chemical pollutants, some of which we breathe, and others that our food comes packaged in.

But that's just a philosophical thought for the moment. 

What's important is the new batch of Orange Blossom Amber.  In addition to using the Pre-made Amber kit, this batch has one and a half pounds of orange grove honey added shortly before the end of the boil.  Didn't want the orange flavors to boil off over the course of a one hour boil, so I added it right at the end, just long enough to sterilize any germs.

Here is the Amber right after I added the yeast and installed the airlock.  The light foam on the surface is just from pouring it into the fermenter.

Here is a picture taken the following day.  The yeast are busy!  The carbon dioxide gas they release in the sugar mixture creates tiny bubbles and produces a thick foam.

Below is a photo taken on day four.  The simple sugars have been eaten and the yeast are moving onto the more complex sugars.  The airlock is not bubbling quite so fast now.  The foam has some crusty-looking brown stuff in it, which is dead yeast cells from previous generations.

Next up after the Orange Blossom Amber is a the Gold Dust IPA (India Pale Ale), a light, bitter and hoppy beer.

I also kegged a Belgian Honey Wheat beer that I made back in February.  The recipe calls for it to sit in a secondary fermenter for 4 months!  One thing I noticed is how little haze the beer has when you allow it to settle for so long.  Take a look at the fermenter and the glass.  This definitely has more clarity than any of my other brews!

This beer had a ton of fermentable sugar in it (the kit was quite expensive), and the high alcohol content actually gives the beer a little heat, like wine.  I guess it's about 10-11% alcohol or 20 proof.  I've never had a beer that burned before...

Lastly there is a cool time-lapse video I found on the internet.  It shows a week of fermentation in a couple of minutes.  When the yeast are active, they generate quite a bit of heat and cause quite a bit of circulation.  You can see the process in the fermenter, it just seems REALLY fast in time-lapse. 

So the yeast are really busy but don't accomplish much, except to quickly run themselves out of food and kill themselves in their own waste.  I'm sure there's something I could say about humanity, but I won't.  I will say this - homebrew is really cool and tastes awesome!

Brew Day

On my 2.5 days off, after humping rocks all day, I managed to make up a couple of brews.  Earlier in the week, the UPS guy had dropped off some wonderful things.  Food-grade stainless steel pepsi syrup kegs for storing my brew!

So, I made a batch of Sarsaparilla for Grace.

And afterwards I brewed and began fermenting a clone of Deschutes Twilight Summer Ale

So here we are with the extract and hops lned up against the rocks.  Far left is the fermenter.  The plastic pail to the right holds sanitizing solution, a mixing spoon, and a wort chiller.  The shiny bucket in the middle is a brew kettle on top of a burner, and that's just a propane tank to the right.  Oh yeah, and an Alaskan Summer Kolsch front and center :)

Note to self:  During the winter months, build a brew stand on rollers! 

 The Kolsch beer at the bottom will be my next brew:

Cheers everyone!

Brewfest!

For Christmas I requested and received a home beer brewing kit. However, due to the recent move, I had no opportunity to get a batch going until this past days off. It was a lot of fun, and I think that I will be doing more of it! Since it took a fair amount of time to get everything set up and sanitized, I decided to make a second batch right after I did the first batch.

Here is a picture that I took while brewing my first batch.  (I really need to remember to clean the lens of my cell phone before taking pictures with it).   My first attempt was using a kit for an Irish Red Ale.  It called for steeping some specialty grains to impart a particular flavor into the wort.  At the edge of the boiling pot, you can see a paper clip holding a porous bag that holds the grains.

The wort is usually boiled for an hour. This accomplishes a few things: It converts starches to sugars for the yeast to feed on, it sterilizes the liquid, and it allows time for hops to bitter the sweet, sugary mixture. After that, the wort must be aerated and cooled to the point where yeast can survive, so that the yeast have a friendly environment to reproduce.

Afterwards the wort must be placed in a sanitized container and allowed to ferment.  Homebrewers often split the fermentation is split into two phases, a vigorous primary phase and a slower secondary phase.  The primary phase is fast, and produces a frothy foam so you need a large container to keep from blowing foam out the airlock.  The primary fermentation also produces a lot of dead yeast cells, which can create bad flavors.  After a couple of days the wort is transferred to a secondary fermenter, without transferring the dead yeast cells at the bottom.

Here is a photo my first two batches, freshy transferred to the secondary fermenters. On the left is the Irish Red Pale Ale, and on the right is Mark's Orange Peel Hefeweizen - a mildly hopped wheat beer.

The beer has to "condition" in the secondary for 2-3 weeks to complete the conversion of sugars to alcohol, and to reach its best flavor.  Then it can be bottled or kegged.

I know myself well enough to know that I would never wash and sanitize 40+ bottles every time I made a batch, so I decided to purchase equipment for kegging my home brews. Home-brewers use soda syrup kegs, because the lid opens up and they can be cleaned and sanitized easily, but can then be sealed and pressurized with CO2.