The reason for the gloom was that I was starting to come to the realisation that our first batch (which is still sitting in secondary as I type this) was going to taste nothing like Kwak, and maybe even nothing like beer. I don’t have all that much to base that on; in fact I’m really only basing it on the mistakes that we made during our first boil, but for some reason I just can’t shake the feeling that we killed off some of the yeast by using the chlorine sanitizer.
But the mood picked up pretty quickly after we got going and I honestly think it has a lot to do with this little beauty!
Not me (although if truth be told I am the life and soul of the party), it was the sanitizer. We bought a StarSan knock off from our friendly internet homebrew store, and it seems to be freaking awesome! The last time we brewed we used this beast to sanitise our equipment
It seemed pretty awesome at the time, but it took ages to fill, we used the wrong type of sanitizer and as a result the kitchen stank of chlorine and all of the equipment had a slight grainy residue. Filling this massive vat by hand meant that the floor was covered in water and it made moving around the kitchen a massive pain the ass.
Now compare it to this bad boy!
Smaller, less mess and no need to spend ages filling it with water. It was an absolute pleasure, and it wasn’t a two man job to empty it.
“But Donnelly” I hear you call, with a smug glint in your eye and your half filled notepad perched on your lap “a few paragraphs ago you said that, and I quote “I honestly think it has a lot to do with this little beauty!” Surely had you used the same volume of water for the first batch of sanitizer, the type of sanitiser wouldn’t have mattered. The benefits you got were by way of the fact you used less water.”
You sit back in your chair smile to your gaggle of friends, and if it was an 80’s movie, high five the jock from the football team, who for some reason appreciates an excellent counter argument, especially if its at a nerds expense.
Sure I’d be taken aback, I’d stall, maybe shuffle my notes and clear my throat. But its all an act. I’m waiting for you to say “well Donnelly, didn’t think about that did you” and then BAM.
In hindsight I would lose this argument as merely showing a picture of the product doesn’t hammer home the sheer joy that comes from using it. This is the SaniClean solution that we used to sanitise and the cap on the left is filled by squeezing the bottle. When it is full it contains 1oz of saniclean. Very handy for figuring out how much to use in a bin, but or vat of water. We did use way too much water last time….bitch.
The squeezy feature was a strange thing to cheer us up, but it did, so we got going. Big lesson learned from last time ….. get organised. All too often on our last boil did we have an alarm go off letting know it was time for the next set of ingredients and we would stare blankly at each other, run to the book and franticly measure out the ingredients.
Well not this time bucko. Before we even started to boil the water we measured out each ingredient into bowls and added them to muslin bags so that when the time came, we were ready to dunk those bad boys in.
Next we sanitised the carboy using the new SaniClean solution and the awesome power of gravity. (Seriously, neither of us copped when we moved to secondary last time that putting one carboy higher than the other would help the auto-siphon out. Idiots!)
We were ready to go. It was around now that the beer I had been drinking started to kick in and two things happened:
(1) I became very aware of the importance of getting off the ingredients measured out early
(2) I started to wonder if Dónall’s dad was proud of me
After some awkward conversation we moved on to bigger matters. Namely the issue of the rolling boil. Last time, we really messed up the boiling process, for a number of reasons, but one of the big ones was that we never really got the water up to a vigorous rolling boil. I was determined this time to get that part at least right.
After conditioning the malt and sparing to the brew pot we were ready to get the show on the road. We gave it the old college try with the lid off, but the oven just didn’t have the power to reach a rolling boil. We discussed propane, turkey fryers and Frenchmen while we waited and I could feel that heavy heartedness that accompanied the first boil start to return. In fact we had sort of both reached an agreement that this rolling boil lark would never work. We had been at a low boil for about 10mins and just for completeness I stuck the lid on the pot, just to see if it would make a difference and then, like a fat man after a curry, the shit got going.
I have to say that this rolling boil was probably the first real success that we had with the brewing process so far. Everything else was measuring and cleaning, and for some reason getting that water to boil like a mo-fo was an incredibly satisfying feeling.
After the boil there were two main priorities, cool the beer as fast as we could, and find a pizza deal that we could both agree on. While there are many, many blog posts about cooling beer, I wouldn’t say there are many about two drunk idiots arguing about pizza toppings. And with good reason too. The latter is incredibly frustrating.
While the beer did this:
We did this:
Had a few more beers and watched some family guy. When the beer was cool we moved it to the carboy using our newly found gravity powers. Then things took a turn for the racial and Dónall substituted his brewing hat for this.
And pointed out the similarities between attaching a brew belt and arming a bomb.
So, I’m going to go ahead and call this boil a massive success. The end product from this boil looks a hell of a lot better than it did after the first boil and it was a much calmer, enjoyable experience.
What we did differently this time
Used much less water for sanitising
Used a much funner sanitiser
Used tap water instead of bottled water
Used muslin bags (I forgive you for reading muslim after the last few pictures) for the hops
Achieved a rolling boil
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