Cream Ale Rehash Boilbucket Brew

[Langchop Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Langchop]

Yea I am starting to tend towards that thinking.

[Langchop Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Langchop]

Quick report back on the boilbucket ferment experiment and the associated beer after bottling day:

THE BEER:

After 3 days of no gravity change as per refractometer (~1.017), and a final hydrometer measured SG at 1.007 plus 3 days of gelatine based settling, it was time to bottle...

On opening the lid, something I have never experienced before: a very resilient and leathery krauseny skin on the top of the beer. I had already made sugar syrup to add and stir in. I broke through a little hole in the middle and poured through the sugar solution and gently stirred through that same hole. I am a bit weary it wasnt stirred enough, but I didnt want to mix that skin into the beer.

It looks wet and krauseny but it really was quite thick and tacky. It could also have been from the gelatine overdose I gave it. Anyone had a similarly persisting layer on their beer before? I can only guess its from all cold break remaining in the fermenter.
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Beer smelt quite good and malty. Didn't taste that wonderful, with very slight flavours of bubblegum and toothpaste. (which ironically was characteristic of the previous brew that I am trying to replicate) Odd I know, but as mentioned elsewhere, I am trying to replicate an old brew which aged to perfection.

Despite 3 days of clarifying, beer was very murky. It was also very pale but this was expected due to the very basic malt profile (if you can call pale malt+vienna a 'malt profile' !?)
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First and last bottle
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So overall I am happy with the beer flavours and am hoping it will be a good maturing beer like last time. I am disappointed with the clarity, but I am sure with very extended bottle conditioning it will clear well.

For some reason I got some funny figures with efficiencies for which I now think I need to check the calculations:
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"Beerhouse efficiency" is my little add-on to account for final stage losses and dead space losses. So basically what eventually gets into the BOTTLES.

In my tradition of sustaining myself through the bottling process with a nice craft beer, and in celebration of recently loosened laws on cannabis, I quaffed a poison city cannabis IPA. I would be lying if I said I knew what cannabis/ hemp tasted like in a beer, but it was a very good IPA overall
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BOILBUCKET FERMENTER EXPERIMENT

Ok, so onto the Boilbucker Fermenter experiment aspect..
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The overall process of the wort/beer remaining in one vessel, without separating trub or sediment until the end may have been responsible for the unusually tacky layer on top of the beer, but could have been affected by the excess gelatine as well.

The bucket itself has no watertight rubber seal but does have a double lipped plastic on plastic seal which I am sure sure was enough to keep oxygen out under positive CO2 pressure conditions. The vent on the top was covered with a silicone flap which would easily allow air to escape but not flow in. So there was no bubbler to monitor activity, but it was easy to see it through the transparentish translucent blue bucket.

A bit of a dilemma when starting bottling... I had drilled the bore of tap to the size of the filler tube that I had measured with a vernier. I trusted it was right and never tested it. On bottling day it just didnt fit despite my softening the tube in boiling water to help it along. Eventually I managed a MacGyver with a small section of PVC tube between the tap and the filler tube.
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The sediment level was perfectly just below the tap inlet, and the bottling was done mostly with very little visible sediment coming through. I think the tacky top layer help keeping a lot of it in one mass.

I could not taste any unusual or unexpected flavours in the green beer which may have been from buildup or burning on the element. On cleaning up the bucket afterward, the element wiped clean to bright shiny metal with a gentle wipe, with no buildup that needed to be scrubbed off. So cleaning only one vessel at the end of the entire process (including brew day) suites me just fine. It really was an easy brew and I didnt have any of those "OMG is it really worth all the work" moments. Probably the only tricky thing is that when cleaning the bucket you have to keep the element external connector dry. But really just a minor inconvenience. I cleaned the nooks and crannies around the element with a bottle brush, which was quite effective.
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The mash/ boil/ fermentation levels worked out very well throughout the process to give a pretty good beer volume to equipment size ratio:
-Mash was ~50mm from the top
-Grain bag weight was probably just a bit too heavy to easilyhold and squeeze. I think a factor though was the additional height more than my usual pot. I think it would be juuuuuust manageable if it was on a lower table or even the floor
-Boil started at about ~120mm from the top with no boilover or splash issues
-Post boil dilution back to the target density took it back to about 120mm from the top, quite suitable headspace for a krauzen
-Sediment buildup was round about what I normally have, and the tap position was perfect to suck clean beer almost immediately after the first little chug.
-Getting 36x440ml bottles out of a 20L (officially, or 25L unofficially) bucket is not bad at all I dont think


Including fixing the tap-filler tube issue, sanitizing bottles and equipment, bottling, packing bottles, labeling (they were pre-printed) took about 1 hour 45 minutes. Cleaning up took about 30 minutes. Time wise overall, I saved about 2 hours on brew day (and probably saved another half hour on cleanup), and on bottling day I probably saved about an hour+ on bottling and cleanup.

So I am quite happy with the return on effort ratio and easy brewing process.

Would I do it again? Not really sure. I made a beer that I know takes a long time to get to its prime (hopefully I can enter it this time next year if its good!) I think I will do a more traditional beer first and assess it from there. At this stage though, I see no reason not to.

Thanks for everyone's inputs on this little experiment

[Harhm Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Harhm]

Good work It would be worth the trouble to do it again with a other beer that you have brewed a few times. I might try it myself. I would just add a cold crash step that would help a lot to clear the beer and solidify the yeast cake, ensuring better clarity when adding the priming solution to the kettle/fermenter

[Langchop Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Langchop]

Strangely, despite being one of my murkiest beers to date on bottling, it has cleared phenomenally well in just 24 hours

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It would be worth the trouble to do it again with a other beer that you have brewed a few times.

I think I may actually try that Mad Giant Killer Hop IPA clone recipe. I have been struggling with retaining hoppiness with my hoppy beers lately and have started suspecting equipment (vessels/ tubes/ taps etc) so maybe doing a hoppy beer in a new(ish) vessel and method will confirm this for me and kill two birds with one stone.