Friday, January 28, 2011
Finally, the stout's carbonated and ready to go! Really happy with the results.
On a less happy note, I took a sip of the IPA and was disappointed. Body's a little thin, so I'm hoping it'll beef up somewhat after carbonation. But what really irked me was the colour - alas! it's a horrid, muddy brown colour. Like alcoholic lao sai. Perhaps I'll name it India Mud Ale instead. =( I think the fault lies with me - it's barely been 5 days and I'm fooling around with it already.
Also, my frozen yeast bank experiment failed horribly. Basically I'm trying to save a few bucks ($6 per brew, to be exact) by storing and reusing the yeast. So. Most yeasts settle to some degree to the bottom of the fermenter at the end of the whole thing. I took the yeast cake from the bottom of the fermenter, washed and extracted the yeast, and added glycerin before freezing it. It's supposed to work. Well, I took one of the vials out, added glucose solution, and ... NOTHING. No fermentation, no nothing. The yeast's dead!! I'm guessing I added way too much glycerin.
I just spent the last 1 hour transferring the India Mud Ale to a secondary fermenter, and washing the yeast. This time, I added 10% glycerin instead of 25%. Let's see if this works. The stout and ale yeasts are experiments to see if this works, since I'm really actually trying to reuse liquid yeast. These last 2 yeasts I'm talking about are dry yeasts, which cost me $6 to $7 a pop, which in itself isn't that cheap. But for the hefeweizen that I'll be attempting next, the German liquid yeast costs $17, so I'm hoping to be able to salvage the leftover yeasts to reuse.
The name India Mud Ale's starting to grow on me.
Wenky
12:38 AM
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