So many questions Hez.
All relevant though, to a point. Yes there should be another post, and you can probably sift the forums for all the answers.
What should you do about the water?
At an extreme, buy or make distilled / reverse osmosis water and build the profile from scratch.
Adding the ppm per mineral/compound you need. To get the profile you need.
getting the correct pH for the mash, i think is around 5.4 is important too, you can do a few things but kilos of gypsum is not one of those things you should try. you can use acid and phosphoric is easily available. and you too can use acid malt.
if i were you i would try on 100mL of distilled water, whatever you want maybe acid is easiest, dose the water and see what you results are, then scale them out.
you would need to do a proper check that with preboiled wort first though, just to see how it pans out.
proper pH for finished beer (IPA) de-gassed mind you, should be 4.0 or even lower, around 3.5.
for now, tick it up to learning, water chemistry may arguably be more important than controlling fermentation temperature.
good water makes good beer is a good rule of thumb.
i wouldn't worry about the ebay thing at the moment.
a good pH meter might be a better investment.
Quote from this article:
http://brulosophy.com/2014/09/18/a-pragmatic-approach-to-water-manipulation/
"I tend to view water manipulation as more of a final step in a homebrewer’s development where already tasty recipes are taken to the next level by honing in on a specific water profile. Water is a polishing agent and you can’t polish a turd."
First of all I have to be able to make something worth honing and polishing. But I'll keep on studying the water chemistry. I will put another post when I know more!
and again, going back to the root of the issue, no real hoppines, you have make sure to keep O2 out of the finished product too.
Tell me if I have it right, please...
1- After the boil you have to try not to expose the beer to the air in order to avoid contamination (bacterias, fungus, wild yeast...): I cover my kettle with the lid when the amount of steam/vapor starts to reduce and when it's at pitching temp I pour it quickly (without strainers or anything else) from the kettle to the fermenter.
2- Before pitching the yeast, you have to oxigenate as much as you can the wort. I don't have an oxygen tank, so the cheap alternative is to shake the fermenter to try to "mix some air inside" the wort. Another cheap alternative is to put an aquarium air pump. Both ways (shaking and pumping air) will have the same risk in terms of possible contamination, wont them?
3- While fermenting, the airlock allows the air to escape from the inside of the fermenter. This will be the air captured when closing the fermenter + the C02 the yeast produces. The CO2 is heavier than air, so at some point all the "air" inside the fermenter will be almost 100% C02. For dry hopping you need to open the fermenter and drop your hop sock inside. While you do that, you might capture some air, but again, the co2 has a high density, so this cheeky air is not likely to reach the beer itself, anyway, the fermentation is still going on, so new C02 will expel the unwanted air from our VIP CO2 environment.
4- After fermenting I bottle using a "wand" (springloaded valve ) directly connected to the fermenter, and once the bottle is full I cap it right away. The air captured inside the bottle will remain closer to the cap due to the same old tune.. new CO2... higher density bla bla as well as the air that goes inside the fermenter when you remove the airlock for filling the bottles.
I don't do bulk priming for these reasons:
- I don't have another container with a tap/spigot than the fermenter and I don't want to buy another thing I have to clean, sanitize and store which I'll have to dump in less than a year (because I'll be leaving Australia).
- I only brew 10L batches. Priming 30 bottles is not that bad. And my modified syringe for calculating different amounts of priming sugar method works like a treat.
- I don't beleive having the turb inside the fermenter affects the beer, I agree with Larry (
https://beernbbqbylarry.com/2017/04/29/why-i-dont-rack-to-a-secondary-fermenter/)
-> Transfering the beer from the fermenter to another container would expose it to air and thus to oxidation and possible contamination.
I have pretty clear the causes of the non-hoppiness in this beer:
1st main cause: I put less than half the hops I should have used for dry hopping
2nd main cause: I didn't do a proper 0' addition
other causes that might affect: fermentation temperature, PH, minerals, water filtration, etc. etc. etc.
All in all, I don't think I had a lot of oxydation due to my process. The problem is my recipe was wrong and I was a cheap with the hops.
Thank you!
