It's All About Patience

I decided to rack my latest brew (Sierra Nevada pale Ale Clone) to the secondary fermentor yesterday. It had been in the primary for 2 weeks, which is plenty long enough. Typically, 1 week in the primary is enough to finish fermentation, but I spent last week in Tucson at the Waste Management conference, so the beer just had to wait.

One basic tenet of homebrewing is that one must DRINK beer while making beer. So with this in mind, I decided to crack open one of my hazelnut porters, of which I've written much about lately. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that good things come to those who wait...

That's right, kids...the beer has CARBONATION! After thinking about it for a little while, a tiny light bulb went off in my engineer head. Yeast takes longer to do its thing when temps are low. Well, my kitchen rarely creeps above 60 in the winter unless the pellet stove is raging. Since this batch is sitting in boxes on the floor, I imagine the remaining yeast in these bottles was working at a snail's pace. No matter, the beer is now carbonated and the brewers are happy. The lesson I learned from this is that most things that happen during brewing are cause & effect, provided you know what to measure and where to look to see what it means. This all comes with experience and a few messed up batches along the way. The good part is the longer you do it, the higher the probability that the batch will turn out good.

Getting back to that Sierra Nevada...Russ & I have high hopes for this one. The first tasting was very positive. Nice bitterness and clarity. Should turn out even better since we just dry-hopped it with another ounce of cascade. We'll bottle in a week, then wait another 2-3 to try it out.

I'm planning to post some Tucson photos next. Wife stuck me with a film camera out there (the horror!) so I have to get it developed first.

Cheers!