The beer started showing signs of fermentation in 12 hours or so with fairly rapid bubbles through the airlock. About a week and a half in, the airlock had slowed to a crawl and I finally found some new vinyl tubing (my old tube was too dirty to clean) to transfer my beer to my brand new (read: found on the street) secondary fermenter.
While transferring, I found a large portion of the yeast had floated to the top of the primary and smelled awful, but the beer below, flowing into the secondary, smelled amazing, like a mountain of oranges with sugar on top. I did my best to leave the floating yeast cake in the primary.
As I was advised in the brew shop, I topped off my secondary fermenter; it took almost 2 pints of water to limit the exposed surface area. Which it appears may not have been necessary. The transfer to the secondary reawakened enough yeast to overflow my airlock and now, after almost a week in the secondary, the airlock is going every three seconds like clockwork.
As I found the incredible reawakening of my yeast a bit odd I looked it up. Apparently WLP400 (the yeast I used) takes about 3 weeks to reach terminal gravity and many people recommended stirring it regularly which would explain the resurgence after the transfer.
Went to the home brew shop today, swapped out some of the hops, and made a few minor substitutions in the grain, gonna start cleaning tonight and brew tomorrow.
Tastes a lot like molasses (almost a little burnt flavor) but with a much smoother mouth feel, not nearly so thick.
wikipedia tells me
In China, sorghum is fermented and distilled to produce maotai, which is regarded as one of the country’s most famous liquors.
and
Sorghum is in the subfamily Panicoideae and the tribe Andropogoneae (the tribe of big bluestem and sugar cane).
witch I’m guessing is why it was chosen as a fermentable material to replace wheat, barley, rye and oats. Though I wonder if that would make this not beer but maotai. Also I’m gonna say the relation to sugar cane would explain the molasses flavour.
While hops are on the ingredient list they are almost non existent in the flavour profile leaving a very sweet sweet beer.
need to make a rating system for my reviews …. rating coming soon.
So while transferring from the primary to the bottling bucket I forgot to close the spout on the bottling bucket so I lost almost a gallon of beer to the floor. Not fun but not the end of the world. Cleaned up pretty easy with a big towel… that I put in the laundry and forgot about, encouraging the growth of lots and lots of mold. It washed out so it’s all ok but Jackie will make fun of me for the rest of time.
After the spill it all went into bottles without incident and was given this label:
Not much to report, the brew went pretty smoothly. Scott and Sarah K came over to lend a hand. Ended up taking a while to clean the kitchen so we didn’t start the brew until almost 1AM. They had to go not long after the grains finished steeping so I ended up maintaining the boil alone for most of it. After the brew was over I woke up Jackie to hold the the brew pot in the bathtub while I finished preparing the fermenting bucket.
Note: Buy a good manual can opener. The cheep one from 7-11 was worse than the electric that I ended up using again.
1.072 original measured gravity at 75F + .0015 to compinsate temp = original gravity of 1.0735
I did all the big preliminary work to do my next brew last night. My fermenting bucket still had the smell of my last beer in it but it’s all clean now. All that’s left for tonight is cleaning the brew pot and sterilizing everything.
I think I may switch the roles of my buckets this time around just to keep the wear on them even. They both have spigots but only one has a thermometer stuck to it, we’ll see how it goes.
Jackie’s boss loved my first beer and ordered a full batch. I got the last of the kit I used at my local shop (Thanks for the assist Andy) and may brew as soon as this weekend.
