The Old Man Lived in Wooley Swamp

My next batch of beer, a clone of Bell's Two-Hearted IPA, is done! The brewday went pretty well, aside from a narrowly-avoided boilover and the fact that I forgot to get ice to cool the wort down before I started. I had to run to the gas station across the road mid-boil to get two bags. No problems, though! In a few weeks, I'll transfer this beer to secondary, and add another oz. of hops to make it extra hoppy. This technique is called "dry hopping." I've never done it before, but I look forward to seeing how it turns out!

This really isn't what I wanted to talk about, though. I wanted to talk a little about my swamp cooler (hence the terrible Charlie Daniels reference in the title and video). I've tried a swamp cooler before with less-than-stellar results. But I think I've worked out all the kinks now. If I have, then this will be the key to getting great homebrew. So, what is a swamp cooler?

Basically, a swamp cooler is a tub of water in which you put the carboy while the beer is fermenting. Then, you can adjust the temperature of the water using ice. If it's really hot, you can take a t-shirt and drape it over the carboy so that the water is wicked up and evaporates, cooling it even more.

So, here's a picture of my carboy bubbling away in a swamp cooler.

As you can see, this fermentation is in full swing. The bottle in the back is what I'm using to cool it. Basically it's a two-liter coke bottle filled with water. I then froze it along with two other bottles so I can swap them out and keep the temperature low enough for the yeast to do its job without producing bad off flavors.

So far this system has been working. As you can see from this picture, the temperature of the carboy has been holding at a nice 68 degrees.

After I took this picture, I replaced the bottle, and the temperature went down another degree or so, but that's fine. It's better for it to be a little on the cold side anyway. For a little perspective, this yeast's optimal temperature is 60-72 with 66-68 really being the best. I've been fermenting close to (or past) the 72 mark. However, with the swamp cooler, I can keep it in that 66-68 range, making much better beer.

However, I do need to make sure I stay on top of this. I had a problem early on in the fermentation when the water got TOO cold. The carboy's temperature got down to about 56 and it stopped fermenting. Temperatures this low cause the yeast to go dormant. It's not that bad, and since it was so early in the stages of fermentation, it shouldn't hurt it. I just warmed it back up a little bit, and it took off like a rocket (as you can see in the pictures above).

Now I just have to keep rotating those bottles, maintaining a good temperature while it ferments. I'll let you know if I have any other hiccups. Also, I'll write another post going more in-depth about this style and the beer I'm cloning! Until then!

Beers of Christmas Present

It's been a couple of days since I wrote a post about my brewing, and since I have a little bit of free time, I thought I'd give a quick update on the goings on of Misdemeanor Brewing.

I bottled the Smoked Amber Ale last week, so that's carbing up in the closet now. It tasted pretty good. It fermented a little hotter than it should have (a problem I always seem to have), so there are some off flavors, but overall it's pretty good! Since I brewed it for Woodfest, I have declared that it henceforth shall be known as Woodfest Ale. It generally takes about two weeks to carbonate in the bottle, so it will be ready for Woodfest whether Woodfest is ready for it or not!

So, now that the Woodfest Ale is gradually building up the bubbles, I've started on my next beer. This will be an IPA that's a clone of Bell's Two-Hearted Ale. This one should be good! I'm a big fan of Two-Hearted, and I can't wait to see how this stacks up. Since the fridge still has some work to go and I'm probably just going to use it for kegging anyway, I'm going to try my hand at a swamp cooler again. I think I know what I can do to make this one better, so I should be able to control the temperature of the fermenting beer more accurately, thus minimizing the off flavors. Right now I have a yeast starter going for that, and I should be ready to brew tomorrow or Thursday.

Other than this, the other exciting thing about my brewing right now is that I am joining a local brew club. This club, called CHAOS, seems really cool. They have a brew house not too far from here on the Ell, with lots of cool stuff going on. They just got a bunch of 53 Gal barrels that they are going to fill up. So, I plan on getting a stake in that, giving me about 5 gallons of barrel-aged beer. It's really nice to interact with other homebrewers in real life, and I can tell I'm going to learn a lot from these more experienced brewers!

Well, that's about all for the update on my brewing. I'll probably post a more in-depth description of the Two-Hearted clone once I get that going. Until then!