Fermentation is a Beautiful Thing

 

Fermentation is an interesting process. I can only imagine that the first brewers must have thought it was magic or some kind of demon breathing life into their wort. Just think about it, you basically put "grain tea" in a jug, add some yeast, and in 8 hours you get a bubbly foam appearing on top and bubbling from what seems to be nowhere.

In the picture above you can see 4 different brews at the different stages of fermentation. In the upper right, you have a brew that was pitched (yeast added to it) 8 hours earlier. It is blowing CO2 through a blow-off tube like you were blowing as hard as you can into the jar. The crousen (foam on top) is white in color and is "rolling" up from the bottom.

In the upper left, you can see what the carboy to the right will look like 24 hours later. I have swapped the blow-off tube to an airlock, and the bubbling has reduced to about a bubble a second. The crousen has started to darken in color and the yeast is settling to the bottom.

The carboy in the lower right is another day older and the airlock is bubbling once every 10 seconds or so. The crousen is continuing to darken and settle, and this will proceed in this manner for a week until I rack (transfer) it over to another carboy. By that point the bubbling will have dropped to once every minute or so, the gravity will have leveled off, and the crousen will be gone or reduced from the top.

The carboy in the lower left is one that has just been racked. It only bubbles every few minutes and is resting to balance out the flavors. We have had some bubble and foam a little after this step, after it is stirred up from the process, but after 2 weeks in the secondary fermentor it will be ready to bottle. OCBC typically uses a 1-2-3 method. One week in primary fermentor, two weeks in secondary, and three weeks in the bottle. The secondary time and bottle time can vary and a few extra weeks in these steps can really help smooth out the flavors and the balance out the beer.

Check out the video below to see and hear the fermentation in action.

Simple Efficiencies Make Big Differences in Brewing

When our club started brewing, our first priorities were to get the steps right, try to understand the process and what was happening, and to see where we could find efficiencies. After 2000 bottles of beer made, our knowledge is solid and our efficiencies are paying off.

New efficiencies on brew day have made it where we can add new processes to make a better beer and not take up any extra time in our day. The water still has to get up to boiling, the hops have to boil for an hour, but by switching to a contra-flow chiller instead of our immersion chiller, we have saved 45 minutes. We are then able to use 30 of those minutes to introduce a better aeration process, with an aeration stone instead of just shaking the carboy, which is getting us better fermentation and better beer.

With our fermentation starting faster and more vigorously from the additional oxygen, we are able to rack the brew to a secondary in 7 days instead of waiting 10-14 days typically before. For the racking process we invested in a new 1/2" racking cane to replace a 5/8" cane and have been able to rack 5 gallons of beer from carboy to carboy in 5 minutes instead of 15.

Bottling the beer has always felt like a long, painful process. We started sanitizing bottles by dunking them in a sanitized solution, in a bucket, but we got a bottle sprayer that we can pump the sanitizer in and set them asside to be filled, instead of filling the bottles individually and pouring them out. We also got a 1/2" bottle filler to replace a 5/8" one, and just like the racking cane, we improved our time. We went from a 30+ minute process, to bottling 50 beers in 10 minutes.

It definitely seems like everything else in life, you live and learn, and time saved makes everything feel more manageable.