We've put a handful of blog posts up by now seeing as this will be our third beer brewed, I'd be shocked if you hadn't read the other blog posts at this point, so all of you will inevitably be surprised impressed by this post. This will be the first beer brewed with a blog posting in mind, so reading this one will be terrible in ways different from the previous blog posts on the topics of the first two beers. Now that I've established how funny I am and that this is going to be a different style of post than our readers reader is used to, let's discuss the two elephants in the room.
Number one, despite an Oktoberfest being a lager we will not be lagering this beer or climate-controlling this beer below 65° F. That would require equipment that we don't have and honestly aren't at a skill level to purchase anyways. Instead, we will be using a pseudo-lager Kviek yeast that can be fermented between 68° F and 95° F, so like most home brewing yeast, this will be able to be fermented comfortably in our basement. Some of you might be saying "that's stupid, you're stupid, and I hate this beer." Here's my response "maybe, absolutely, and good news you don't have to drink this beer."
Number two, Dakota's giant elephant penis. I know this doesn't have a ton to do with brewing beer, but it's distracting nonetheless. Frankly, he's blessed and there's nothing we can do about it other than try not to compare ourselves to him. It's hard challenging but we'll have to do our best.
The Recipe
As usual, this isn't a recipe we crafted ourselves, it's a recipe that we found online that looked easy enough for us make and we ruined augmented it to fit what ingredients we could find. Big thanks to those homebrewers out there that have put in the time to be able to craft their recipes so dummies like us can use them. As usual, the view from a giant's shoulder is beautiful.
(You will have to scroll about a third of the way down the page to find the recipe. Why do people always want to fill the beginning of these things with their life story while testing out their stand up material?)
We brew rain or shine
There's apples in the busch light box
Brew day went smoothly, seeing as this is our third batch there was less note referencing. In fact, we even felt confident enough to adjust our sparging method to try to get more fermentable sugars. Basically we added our first lautered gallon back into the mash tun to allow that wort to run completely through the grain filter bed.
Fermenting SAFU
The beer goes in the carboy
So, this is what our fermenting beer looked like 24 hours after pitching the yeast. Nothing broke, but foam did push it's way through and out of the airlock. Nothing we could really do at this point except put a clean airlock on the carboy and hope that no "bugs" got into the batch.
I'm not sure what happened but if I'm taking a guess (I am), then I'd guess that our wort was too warm when we pitched our yeast. This would result in a lot of yeast activity right away, more than the carboy could handle with its head space. The pseudo lager yeast we used for this batch ferments just fine at higher temperatures (65°-90°), so instead of chilling out wort to the usual 70° we stopped chilling at 80°. The thought process being, "well this will allow the yeast to get started strong at a safe temperature, and we'll save some time".
I'm not 100% I've diagnosed this problem correctly, but it's a place to start. If you're reading this blog then you're well aware that it's the chronicle of a few men trapped against the limits of their intelligence. We like to think of it as a modern take on man versus self classic literature. It makes our struggles seem more poetic and less pathetic.
