Re-using yeast

Quick recap: I got married and brewed a dry stout, a Scottish, a saison and a Belgian honey pale ale for the occasion. They all came out well, though I liked the saison best.

Brewed a pale ale with my garden hops and four different small-batch, single-hop IPAs that I really should have documented here. Decided Zeus was my favorite of the hops I tried.

I just bottled a hoppy amber ale, like Troegs Hopback Amber or Nugger Nectar- I'm hoping for something in between them.

I've got a Dubbel (from a Northern Brewer kit) in secondary, and I made a strong golden ale and poured it onto the yeast cake from the Dubbel. There might be off tastes, since I used the same fermenter, krausen and all, but I'm no longer worried about the yeast not being to handle the OG 1.084 wort. For 24 hours, the fermentation was so vigorous I couldn't even hear separate bubbles on the blowoff growler. It was just pushing out gas so fast it sounded like there was a small motor running in my closet. Two days after brewing, I'm still hearing about 3 bubbles/second in there,

Blueberry Imperial Stout

I'm sipping my new stout, which turned out pretty good. I was inspired to make this one down in Florida by Mack in Black, brewed in Fort Lauderdale by Holy Mackerel brewing. It was an imperial stout with a hint of pomegranate juice. You can't even taste the pomegranate when cold, but the fruit comes out as it warms up.

So for mine, I set out to brew it at about 8.5% abv. Unfortunately, the yeast died before long. It was a strong enough strain- I think the cold temperature in my house (around 50 at the time) killed it off too fast. So I added some champagne yeast, and got a bit more bubbling out of it. According to my final gravity reading, it should be about 7% abv, which means I left quite a bit of sugar unfermented.

I added some of that fake blueberry extract for flavoring beer, but not a lot. Half the recommended amount for the batch size, because I didn't want it to be overpowering.

I just opened my first bottle tonight. First impression is that I need to let it carbonate a bit more, although I did get a 1/2" head out of it. Pitch black with a tan head. A little bit of roastiness and blueberry in the nose.

The taste is roastiness first, followed, mixed with a sour blueberry flavor and a bit more hop bitterness than I'd expected.

The main thing I'll change next time I try this is to tone down the hops. I'd also like to use real blueberries in the brew. If that comes out better, I'd try a 3rd batch with a Belgian yeast, which is what Mack in Black uses.

Still, this isn't a bad start. The blueberry is as subtle as I was aiming for, although going down there's a bit of sourness/bitterness that I wasn't looking for. I don't want to give up on this beer, though.

Here's a link to my recipe. I'd love any feedback, suggestions, etc.

5 1/2 month anniversary!

I realized today I've had this blog for 5 1/2 months. I'm happy to report that through Twitter, placement on the beer sub-Reddit, and a lot of posting, I have two regular readers: my girlfriend, Pattie, and my friend Mary. I guess it doesn't matter since this was meant to be a personal document as I explore my state's craft brew scene, but I think in the near future I'll work to get my numbers a little higher. 5, maybe.

I've got a lot planned this year, especially in terms of home brewing. I plan to move to smaller batches, probably 3 gallons, so I can make stronger beers and be more experimental. I want to start all-grain batches, and I plan to move my hop garden this spring to a huge trellis attacked to the back deck so my plants can grow higher- at least 10 feet up.

And there's plenty in my own state I haven't done. Never been to 3Tides or Ebenezer's. Never toured Atlantic or Bar Harbor breweries, even though they're two of my favorites. Never been to a beer festival. Lots of ground to cover in 2009.

Hop harvest

My hops were finally ready to pick Sunday. I was afraid the days of rain we've had would ruin them, but no such thing. When we finally had a dry day, my hops were fine, and just ready for harvesting.

I shot this same branch in an earlier post. You can see how much the cones have grown in a week.


I picked more than 5 oz. of Sterling hops, and about 3 oz. of Cascade. Here's the Sterling. Btw, I didn't do anything to enhance the colors. Hops are really this beautiful.


I added my Cascade hops fresh into a pale ale I was brewing. I'd already added bittering hops (Super styrians) – you can tell by the hop gunk on the spoon and the sides of the brewpot. The fresh hops are just for aroma.


And there it goes. I've never had fresh hop beer, so I'm really looking forward to this.


As for the Sterling hops, they went into my new food dehydrator so I could ready them for later use. They'll be going into the Oktoberfest I brew later this month.


Here are the Sterling hops in a one-ounce, vacuum-sealed bag. I froze them for later. Once the hops were dried, they only weighed two ounces, so I have one more bag frozen with this one.

As for my fresh-hop pale, I tossed in Safale-04 Ale Yeast, and when I woke up for work 6 hours later, it was already happily bubbling away. That should have been a hint.

When I got home, the airlock was filled with green bubbles, and it was starting to bubble through the holes in the cover. As I was getting some sanitary solution together, I heard a hiss. It was spraying straight up against the ceiling of my closet, and onto my clothes, too.

I'm not sure why it overflowed. I had a gallon of empty space in my carboy, and it wasn't a high-gravity beer. But I do have a lot of beers that start fermenting vigorously, then die off almost completely after a few days. I'm not sure why.

Hops are almost ready

Here's one of my Sterling hop plants. I ordered some Nugget, Cascase and Sterling, two rhizomes each, from Northern Brewer and started them in pots after a few days in the fridge.



They all grew in the pots, but one of the Nugget vines didn't survive transplant into the ground. The other hasn't grown well. The leaves are yellowing and it hasn't produced any flowers or cones. Maybe it'll do better next year.



There are a couple of things I did wrong. One was not to prune enough. When my job at the newspaper went full time, it coincided with my getting a ton of hours at Staples and I hardly saw my vines for weeks. The other mistake was not properly supporting them. I started with a tomato trellis for each type. After a week and a half, the Sterling vines had outgrown its trellis. So I found a long piece of edgework that was eventually supposed to go in my house somewhere. I pushed about a foot of it into the ground and wrapped the vine around it. The vine climbed up that, too, and hung off, and grew back down the vine, then up itself and just got more and more tangled. That diagonal stick you see above is the original piece of wood, weighed down by the weight of the vine and the cones. The green post beside it is a metal vine trellis I picked up at Lowe's. I really underestimated how fast hop vines grow. I'll still get a good yield this year, but next year I'll be better prepared.