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.

Orlando Brewing Fieldtrip

Tonight was an education field trip for the OCBC. The Club was due a visit to our local professional brewery (1 of 27 in the state), Orlando Brewing Company. Orlando Brewing is Florida’s only certified organic brewery, and is only 1 of 9 in the entire US! We also found out what it actually means to be organic; It means that ingredients used in crafting their ales are grown without insecticides, bioengineering, genetically modified organisms, sewage sludge or irradiation. Orlando Brewing's Blonde, Pale, Red & Brown Ale, Olde Pelican, Blackwater Dry Porter and European Pilz, are officially certified Organic by the USDA. All our beers are the only ones declared “Fresh From Florida” by the State’s Department of Agriculture. Not only can you taste the difference, but you can see the freshness of the "live" brew.

The main things that the Club took away from the brewery tour and visit with the guide was:
1. We have to move to kegging
2. Recipes are non proprietary
and 3. The only difference in their operation and ours is scale


Moving to kegging was something that we were already exploring, but the explained that going to this process is a big step in growing as a brewing operation. It allows us to skip 2 weeks of the brewing process by adding carbonation through CO2 instead of sugar in the bottles. They even said that if we wanted bottles we could keg the beer, and then turn around and bottle them and drink them immediately. It also made it easier to store and transport than 50 glass bottles.

We also learned that the recipes that we were using from stores, books, and the internet were non proprietary If we can execute the recipes correctly, make good beer, enter it in a competition, and win, it is our prize and our beer. The names and logos that we create are the only things that are proprietor and cannot be taken by anyone else. I am glad we have Michael and Susie to make such an awesome logo and guide us through our label making.

Lastly we learned that the process of making beer doesn't change, just the size of the operation. The owners of Orlando brewing started out like us, with 5 gallon carboys and experimenting with recipes. We did learn all of their processes and how they treat their water, equipment, and ingredients, but it still came down to good water, malt, hops, and yeast.

Orlando Brewing was an impressive facility, with 12 solid beers that are always on tap there and then another 8-10 that they brew seasonally. They have a cool volunteer program that allows curious home brewers the chance to gain knowledge of larger scale brewing by helping clean and do any tasks that are required to make the brew and ship it out. Best of all it showed us that brewing attracts good people and brings people together in good fellowship.