As I prognosticated in my previous blog, I did tap some beer out of the bucket on Saturday to taste it.
It looks nice. It smells like beer. It has an off flavor that I do not like, but I could not tell for sure if I was tasting the bitters in the raw beer, or if it was sour. I have difficulty telling the difference when the beer is green. So I put it aside to think about it and decide what to do with it on Sunday.
By this morning I had decided to go ahead and do the secondary fermentation. There really isn’t anything to lose, and it gives me a week to procrastina…… um… to make a more discerning decision. So I pulled out some more beer and measured the specific gravity, which came out to 1.011. Since the beer wort started at 1.063, the finishing gravity of 1.011 indicates a normal fermentation.
I sanitized the carboy and started a siphon into it.
Peering into the bucket, I saw what would appear to be a ring of beer snot that also indicates a normal fermentation.
I turned the lid over to see what I could find there, and it looks like the foam made it all the way up to my plastic nut, but not through it.
If you look at the ring in the previous photo you can see how far the foam had to climb to get up to the nut. That is another indication of a strong fermentation.
By the way, when I was in the beer store, I bought this tool for prying the bucket open.
It only cost about 6 bucks, and it saved my fingers fer sure. If you plan on brewing in a bucket, get one of these. It works great. They told me that restaurants use it to open 5 gallon buckets of stuff that they buy in bulk.
I will have to rethink the idea of eating in restaurants.
Some funny things happen when you are brewing beer. The makers of Star-San® say that you are not to rinse out the foam. They say that the Star-San will foam up, but you are to ignore the foam and not rinse and just put the beer in with the foam.
OK then.
The carboy was full of foam when I started racking the beer, and here is where it went.
As I kept racking, the Foam Worm kept coming.
And kept coming….
LOL. That foam worm was still clinging to the hose when I pulled it out of the carboy and threw it into the sink for washing.
After all of the beer had been racked into the carboy, I looked in the bucket to see how much yeast was in there. The answer – lots.
I don’t know if you can see in the photo, but there is a puddle of the stuff a couple of inches deep in the corner (the bucket is tilted). I have scraped the bottom of the bucket to show that even up there, there is a quarter inch of so of yeast.
Lots of yeast!
So every indication is that this was a normal, strong fermentation and that the reason for no friendly bloops out of the Big Hose was because it blew the plug out of the little hole. So I am going to go ahead with this beer and assume that the off flavor in it is just from the hops and the fact that it is still green beer.
The next time I do this, I will plug that little hole with something more substantial than a wimpy rubber stopper. I am thinking a stainless steel machine bolt might do the trick.