Brew 2 in Secondary

This beauty is Brew #2 after fermenting for the last 9 days:


It looks and smells delicious. We made many mistakes in the first batch which we seem to have managed to avoid in this batch. As a result, we came a lot closer to achieving our target original gravity (which was 1.085, we were 1.078). We measured the gravity today and it was 1.022. Using a convenient alcohol calculation formula ((original gravity - final gravity) * 131; (1.078 - 1.022) * 131) we calculate that it's around 7.3% ABV, which is not quite the 8.4% we get with actual Kwak, but it's close and there are still a couple of weeks of secondary fermentation left.

Well now, that was a bit beer-nerdy and unpleasantly math-flavoured. So Here is a cool picture of a carboy being cleaned:


Still here? Good.

We also made a much better job of the siphoning this time around. Stupid as it sounds, we placed both carboys side by side the last time and ended up pumping the beer from one into the other, resulting in a stirred up, yeasty beer with a foamy head. This is not a good thing.

This time around, we used a more sensible arrangement, with the primary carboy on a table and the secondary below:


We were very careful not to disturb the sediment and we siphoned with no splashing, resulting in no head and a much clearer beer.

It will sit in the secondary carboy for two or three weeks, during which we hope it will ferment a bit more and it should clear quicker and to a greater extent than the previous batch. We will then keg it and drink it - unless we have died after drinking the first batch, in which case somebody else will keg it and drink it in our memories. I can only assume they will wear our hats while doing so, with black feathers as a sign of mourning.

Brew No.2...Sort of like Mambo No.5

So we’ve spent a lot of money, put in a good bit of time and we still haven’t tasted a single drop of homebrew. We feel somewhat limited by our equipment and the batch that we are fermenting seems pretty goddamn lifeless. The mood was low in Dónall’s filthy kitchen when I called over on Friday night to boil our second batch, and the fact that he had left me waiting in the cold for a half hour outside Martins didn’t help. Even the arrival of the awesome new keg and cylinder didn’t get me going as much as it should have.

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

Racking

Last night we racked the beer to the secondary fermenter. For all you non-beer nerd types out there (I'm looking at you, Mrs. Donnelly) that means we transferred it from the glass carboy its been fermenting in for the last week into a second glass carboy. The idea is to move just the beer and leave behind all the sediment and gunk produced during the initial fermentation stage. Here are some pictures of the gunk:





When we opened the primary carboy, we were pleasantly surprised that it actually smelled like Kwak (which is the sort of beer we're aiming for). We don't expect the final product to be an exact replica - we will, in fact, be happy if neither of us goes blind or dies of food poisoning - but we are quite pleased with the results so far.

The only downside to date is that the specific gravity isn't quite what we would like it to be, but we never expected to hit our targets spot on. Accuracy in this area will come from experience.


Having measured the specific gravity, we decided to taste it, although at this stage it has not finished fermenting and still has a lot of yeast in suspension. I poured the contents into two glasses:


Donnelly, however, had other ideas!


This is the beer as it now looks:


It will sit like that for another couple of weeks, then we will keg it and bottle it and, finally, drink it. With any luck, we will only have to taste it on the way down.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to....brew with?

It’s worth pointing out at this very early stage that what you have stumbled upon is not a comprehensive guide to home brewing, but rather a rambling, disjointed account of two novice home brewers. What you will find here is atrocious grammar, private jokes and drunken literary one-upmanship.

But take heart. The content of this blog is catered just for you. I can say with a high degree of certainty that you are more than likely 1 of 3 people:

1. One of our mothers (Hi Mam!)
2. Someone looking for this Dog on the Road
3. Me in 15 years

In all instances, this blog will provide, at the very least, a documented record of our brewing triumphs and failures, our diminishing hairlines and our undying commitment to getting blasted on something potentially toxic that we made in our own kitchens.

With this half-assed approach to documentation in mind, I’d like to take you on a whistle stop tour of our first brew day.

Brewing Lesson Number 1: Turning up at an emergency water relief centre with 2x20L carboys is bound to attract media attention.

I learned very quickly that you need a hell of a lot of water to brew beer. What luck then that the day we decide to brew is the day that the Dublin water works has a shit fit and leaves all of the north side without water for most of the day.

Queue media frenzy and national coverage of me struggling with a carboy.

Dear man in the queue behind me who didn’t get water because I took the last 40 litres to wash brewing utensils; I’m sorry. At least you got your picture in the paper. I hope you didn’t need the water for a sick relative.

Brewing Lesson Number 2: Dress for success
Much like our brewing name “Dog on the Road”, these hats will mean nothing to you and to explain it would take too much time and not yield much comedy payoff.

Just accept that they are awesome and are dearer to me than my future first born.

Brewing Lesson Number 3: Brew beer with Beer
One of the main things that I took away from our first brew day was that at some point on every brew, you’re bound to make a mistake. For us these ranged from not putting the pot on the hob properly to potentially poisoning ourselves by using the wrong sanitizer on all our equipment. At each of these moments it pays to have a beer on hand. Now, it goes without saying that the more beer on hand greater the potential for making mistakes, but you’re not at work in a commercial brewery, you’re pursuing a hobby. Brewing should be as enjoyable and relaxing as possible, and what better way to do this than by having a beer (ideally from a needlessly fiddly glass).

Brewing Lesson Number 4: Get your shit together.
We made two basic errors early on. Firstly we went to Ikea and bought a 10L pot for brewing. We really should have gotten a larger capacity pot as we had to fiddle with the recipe to ensure we could brew in one pot. While in Ikea we bought a €3 breakfast which I can still feel in my lower intestine – mistake number 1 : cheap scrambled eggs are always a bad idea, even if they are served to you in an incredibly efficient way.

Second, we used the chlorine based sanitizer for the brew pot on all of our equipment. This would have been fine if we thoroughly rinsed the equipment afterwards, but as we thought this was no rinse, we probably have some level of chlorine in the beer – mistake number 2 : spending too much time on the internet, reading snippets of information, gradually reducing my attention span resulting in neither of us READING THE FECKING LABEL.

So all in all it was quite a good first attempt. We both tried the beer before moving it to the primary fermenter and it was simply delicious. A very hoppy, sweet taste.

So there you have it. A completely non-technical, broad brush overview of our first brew day, and what follows is a random assortment of some snaps from the day that cover the various elements of the boil.

Introduction

Dog on the Road Brewing is not a serious brewery, but you might have worked that much out already. Like countless others, we decided to enter the world of homebrewing and, like countless of said countless others, we couldn't resist the temptation to name our newly-formed "brewery". Nor, it seems, could we resist the temptation to create a logo and a blog. I'd like to make a joke about watching this space for t-shirts, but it might come back to bite me on the ass...

Dog on the Road brewing was "founded" in late 2010 by Donnelly and Dónall (me). Here is a picture of us looking silly:


Donnelly and I are recent converts to the church of craft brewing (despite the fact that we own shares in Heineken). Unfortunately there just aren't that many really interesting beers to be had in Dublin; most places only stock offerings from large brewing corporations (with a few notable exceptions). With this in mind, we decided to brew our own beer to better understand the intricacies of this venerable beverage and to get us trousered for cheap.

The name "Dog on the Road" is an in-joke. It refers to an incident that took place when we were teenagers in Wicklow and which offers absolutely no entertainment value to anybody who wasn't present at the time. The fact that many breweries seem to involve canine references is merely serendipitous (check out that last link - you won't be disappointed).

And so that is who we are and what we are doing. This blog will be a record of our brewing adventures, recording every step of the brewing process; the hospital visits; Donnelly's inevitable divorce proceedings and our eventual deaths due to a poorly sanitised carboy.

Stay tuned.