I offer this lagniappe since I am busy this weekend on personal writing and work-related projects (I try not to take work into the weekend, but there is a conference steaming my way).
I’ll follow up with another, more thoughtful post in the vein of “Brewing David,” but hey, take a looky-loo at this yeast activity from my second batch of “Dave” (Saison du Mont), brewed for the May 2 Big Brew of the National Homebrew Association! I adjusted the recipe, prepared a kick-ass yeast starter two days earlier, and vavoom! Is homebrewing fun or what? (A week later, the beer has hit its final gravity on the nose, and though young and flat, is a gorgeous gold and quite delish.)
The video is sideways not because we live in the Big Bend and are therefore skewed 90 degrees, but because I took this with my camera video and wanted to get the airlock-plus-yeasty-snowglobe-action in there.
Posted on this day, other years:
- SEFLIN Presentation, Links and all that - 2007
- Journalist hearts librarian; and, new feeds - 2007
- A "Series" of Thoughts - 2006
- Why School Is Good For Me - 2005
- FRL Spotlight Review: O.k., o.k., I Like Wolfe - 2005
7 Comments
That’s a happy fermentation.
OK, finally. Beer doesn’t float my boat, so it took until just now for me to pay much attention to your adventures in brewing… just look at that!! Who knew it was so Active. So, um, when a bunch of bottles blow their caps in a closet (which I have heard of), where in the process are they??
Yikes, do you have the power to fix my typo? shd be “doesn’t float my boat…”
Yes
Bottle bombs happen after bottling (not surprising) when the flat but now alcohol-ized wort is siphoned into bottles with a small amount of sugar (usually corn sugar boiled with a small amount of water and added to the beer when it is drained into a bottling bucket). If there is too much carbonation or the yeast gets frisky again, these can happen, but modern brewing recipes make it harder. I’m going to start snagging beer *boxes* though, so there is at least containment…
In times of yore, the practice when homebrewing was to add a small amount of sugar to each bottle before filling it with the flat beer. This led to uneven carbonation, and the possibility of “bottle bombs” if you added to much.
As a result the practice was altered so that one adds the correct amount of sugar to the batch of beer and mixing it gently before bottling. This way, the carbonation is more even and there’s less likely to be explosions.
Yeah I realize I made it sound like a recipe for bottle bombs. I am missing a sentence or two.
David is correct, though there are several other ways to handle carbonation. One is with sugar tabs that you add to the bottle. The other is carbonation through other means — which gets into kegging.
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