Brau. Bière. Cerveza. Beer. A thing of beauty in any tongue.

So today, thanks to the benevolence of Mother Nature giving us hellish ice and a snow day, I was able to complete the final step in my latest batch of beer.  This was a batch that was plagued with issues from the very beginning.  First, finding time to get everything started was a royal pain in the ass, but I finally set aside a few hours to do so.  I found the directions that came with the malt extract and yeast to be less than thorough, so I looked up basic extract brewing in my Homebrewing for Dummies book and sorta followed those and sorta followed the original.  I boiled it for an hour, sans hops, as it was a hopped extract, and then cooled it before transfering it to the fermenter.  I added 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of dextrose, diluted in some water, then topped off to 5 gallons.  I had bloomed my yeast prior to pitching….wait, let me amend that.  I tried to proof the yeast….but I feared it was dead.  I pitched it anyway, hoping it would do some crazy Lazarus shit and end up fermenting anyway.  A couple of days later, and still no action in the airlock, so back to Ithaca Beer I went, in search of newer, living yeast.  They helped me out, I proofed it and pitched it, and a day later, my airlock was as busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.  High Kreusen, here we come.

The batch fermented for a solid 8 days before the bubbles slowed to the point that I thought it was safe to bottle without risking explosions.  So this morning, the call came that school was canceled and I thought, “PERFECT!”  I set about nice and early sanitizing and drying all my bottles and hoses and filling apparatuses, etc.  With all pieces of the puzzle clean as the proverbial whistle, I opened the fermenter.  WHEW!  It smelled like the strong stout I had hoped for.  Black gold, Texas tea….it was gorgeous.  Unfortunately, as it was a one-stage fermentation recipe, I had to add the second lot of priming sugar to the bottling bucket and give it a solid stir to mix and aerate, thereby stirring up some of my dead yeasties.  SO, patience again, waiting ’til the sediment had settled again.  From there it was just a half hour to fully bottled and clean-up time.  From there, it’s down to the basement for a couple of weeks and then, IN MY BELLY!  I shall call it:

Black-Ass Stout.  Delicious.

~ by mholl on February 1, 2008.