first beer, a few questions.

[reprobate]

hi all. and firstly thanks - the amount of information on here makes my likelihood of a successful start much higher - i got through just about all of the thread guide on BIAB, and reckon i know enough now to give it a crack. i have some questions which someone may be able to help me out with, which are mostly related to the fact that i have wine-making gear at my disposal and hence a bit of different/extra stuff than most.

pH adjustment - i can do this easily, as i have a pH meter and citric/tartaric. i have read that it is considered by some to be advanced brewing and hence unnecessary for those starting out, but am i right in thinking since i can do it with 2 minutes effort, i should?

gravity - all the stuff about efficiency seems unnecessarily confusing to me. the key thing is sugar concentration at the start of ferment yeah? so as long as my sugar concentration is right pre-boil, with an allowance for the increase due to evaporation, everything should be sweet? (i have a refractometer, so measuring hot stuff is easy and quick).and presumably measuring evaporative loss per hour the first couple of times should make estimating this for future batches pretty accurate.

no-chill method - i have a stainless keg which i intend to use as a fermenter. what i don't have is a means of chilling the wort easily. i do however have CO2 - so i am thinking of siphoning hot wort into a CO2 filled keg in order to avoid oxygen, and then just allowing this to cool naturally before yeasting. is this a decent approach?

wine yeast - i have an excess of this, and would like to try it. according to what i have read, attenuation in beer is largely attributable to the degree to which any yeast can metabolise maltotriose. wine yeasts are likely to be relatively crap at this as it is not an attribute they are selected for. maltotriose seems to be around 9-12% of the sugars in malted grain, so...
does aiming for a slightly higher starting gravity to compensate for this make sense?
would mashing at a slightly lower temperature be a good idea? theory being that this should give more simple sugars / less complex sugars so less of the stuff the wine yeast will struggle with...
and lastly does anyone know what maltotriose tastes like? is it a sweet-tasting sugar, i.e. will a beer with lots of residual maltotriose taste sweet (which would be a concern), or is it more of a body thing?

no doubt i will have a heap more questions after actually brewing something, so i better go and find myself a recipe.

cheers

 

[SergeMarx]

For a first timer you've absorbed a crap ton of knowledge, wish I had that kind of reading done before I started. Anyway, I'll answer as best I can

pH - I have never adjusted but if I had the ability from day one like you do, I probably would. You can, I understand, play around with perceived bitterness by altering pH, and good water is the best place to start obviously

gravity - efficiency isn't confusing at all - your malt contains x amount of (potential) fermentable sugars, your mashing regime extracts y amount. The better your efficiency the less grain you'd need to make the correct volume of wort. Having said that it's not something I worry about. on good days I make more beer, on bad days I make less. I always dunk the bag in a second vessel and try to rinse the grains as much as possible - no big effort for a few extra point gravity

no-chill - that sounds entirely plausible. Do it, and do a control (put a few litres into a plastic bottle with oxygen as headspace) - write up the comparison between the two pre and post ferment and let us know. That sounds like a nice idea.

wine-yeast. At the very least, it's a opportunity to experiment! If you mash at a lower temp then ferment out with wine yeast, I'd be predicting a dry as a motherfucker beer which may not be what you want. The trick I reckon would be to find a beer style that could handle that approach.

 

[yum beer]

I was at Bridge Road the other day and they were doing a brown ale with guys from 8 Wired, some of which they were going to brew with wine yeast, so would seem that is feasible, is it the best, probably not.

 

[SergeMarx]

I was at Bridge Road the other day and they were doing a brown ale with guys from 8 Wired, some of which they were going to brew with wine yeast, so would seem that is feasible, is it the best, probably not.

That sounds like a good approach to drying out a portion then blending it back in - will keep an eye out for that one - that's an exciting collaboration!

 

[Florian]

no-chill method - i have a stainless keg which i intend to use as a fermenter. what i don't have is a means of chilling the wort easily. i do however have CO2 - so i am thinking of siphoning hot wort into a CO2 filled keg in order to avoid oxygen, and then just allowing this to cool naturally before yeasting. is this a decent approach?

Yes, but consider two things:

- wort volume will shrink while cooling, so you can't close of your keg completely or it will most likely either cave in or suck in air through posts or seals. Either leave your keg open (and risk infections), let air in through a sanitary filter or hook up Co2 at low pressure.

- you would need to get some amount of oxygen back into your wort before pitching if you don't want to totally stress out your yeast, unless you're brewing a Hefeweizen and chasing those banana esters (this last bit is from personal experience, YMMV).

 

[reprobate]

thanks for the replies fellas. got some soon-to-be-booze sitting in the keg now, almost cool enough to chuck some yeast in. everything went relatively smoothly, although there will be obviously be a fair bit of streamlining to be done as far as the process goes once i get a bit more familiar with everything.

serge, i've dropped the pH to 5.8, using tartaric since it doesn't have the lemon taste of citric. no real idea of whether it is used in beer production or not, or of any problems this may cause, but it is in there now so we will see i guess. in wine at least increased acidity increases perception of bitterness. i didn't have proper numbers on the percentage of fermentables in the grains i have, so estimated at 75-80% and came away with a pretty decent yield i think. numbers came out at 82% efficiency on that basis, but i think it is probably more likely my efficiency is down a bit from there and the potential fermentables were a bit higher than i estimated. i haven't done a proper trial on the oxygen headspace vs CO2 keg you suggested, but did save the crap from the bottom of the pot which has settled heavier and i might rack that again and ferment the 800mL or so i get. not exactly science, but it may as well go in a bottle rather than down the drain. i was surprised by how much lees there was at the bottom of the kettle - i started with 29L, and had 1.85L of lees, which seemed a pretty high percentage to me - even taking into account racking hot, and the re-settling it is still 1L out of 29 initial, or 1L out of 21 into the fermenter.

florian, yeah thanks for that, i didn't initially think about sucking in the keg, even though i have seen it done before. it seems to have worked pretty well attaching a CO2 fitting and trickling it in so it was just putting a bubble out through the airlock every few seconds. i'm pretty familiar with yeast aeration, but do have one question - everything i've read about beer talks about adding oxygen before yeast, but in wine we don't aerate before the yeast goes in (although the juice is typically produced pretty oxidatively i guess). we do add oxygen after the yeast has been added and has multiplied to pretty much max population, which (temperature etc dependent) is usually a day or day and a half after adding yeast - i can't think of any reason why this would be different - any ideas?

as far as the wine yeast goes, i'll be selecting based on the theory of which bag is open. slightly concerned about too many overt esters which are often produced in wine then die down over time post-ferment, but time will tell i suppose.

other than that, it was all good. need to improve temp control during the mash a bit, i fish-tailed a bit with my boil and half-lidding the pot with tin foil, need to fine-tune the bag attachment system, need some gloves to hold the hot siphon hose more comfortably, and i probably over-stirred (if that is a thing?) due to worrying about temperature stratification and hot spots in the grain. hopefully the ferment goes smoothly and i'll get something drinkable out of it. it seems to me that there is quite a lot of bitterness in there to go with the sweetness at present, possibly too much, but since it is the first wort i've tasted i really have no idea what i am talking about.

cheers

 

[Spiesy]

Due to your wine background you appear to have a good knowledge and understanding in brewing, you're off to a great start.

 

[Spiesy]

Very interested to hear how you go with the wine yeast too.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

Personally, I would have started with a nice clean ale recipie, no ph adjustment and using a yeast with well known characteristics like so-4. This will give you a base line as your first brew, then you can muck around with different yeasts,ph, etc. You might have brewed a beer that may not be all that great, but looked good on paper, and as you have no real base line it will make it harder to fix your flawed beer. Knowledge is great, but only if you know how to use. Bit like an apprentice deciding that he has done all his tech theory and wants to build an F1 car

 

[ricardo]

regarding pH when are you taking the reading, be aware that the malts in the mash will affect the end pH. I would recommend using the bru'n water profile calculation spreadsheet so you can see what the addition of malts and brewing salts do to your end profile.

 

[reprobate]

thanks ricardo, that's something i'll look at in the future for sure - my aim for this first batch was just to get the tap water down to a reasonable level before starting since it is quite alkaline here.

 

[reprobate]

Very interested to hear how you go with the wine yeast too.

i'll definitely report back, but without side by side comparison it will pretty much just be drinkability of the end-product at this stage.
if this batch is a success then i'll keep using it, and at some stage try to do a comparison with a traditional beer yeast, and if it is a failure then i guess the yeast will probably be the first thing i change.

 

[reprobate]

update: used some old EC-1118, which is a wine yeast from champagne. this is generally regarded as pretty neutral flavour-wise - some people reckon that it produces pineapple estery sort of smells, which it does - but my opinion is that these tend to die off pretty quick post-ferment. it's a very widely used and really reliable fermenter in wine: not much foam, doesn't produce many sulphides or much acetic acid, doesn't need much oxygen or nutrients, and flocculates well. also deals well with a range of temperatures, low pH and high alcohol - not that any of these are an issue in what it is being asked to do at the moment.

i racked off hot under CO2 cover into my keg, then let that cool to ambient overnight. chucked the yeast in the next day when it was down to 20C. initial gravity was 1.045, and it had dropped to 1.040 the next morning. i gave it a bit of oxygen at that point. next morning 1.023, and this morning 1.012. assuming my calculations are right that is 74% attenuation and 4.2% v/v after 3 days.

so, at a basic functional 'turning sugar into booze' level it has certainly worked. smells and tastes okay to me too, but i'm not at all familiar with how beer should smell and taste at this stage of the process so will reserve judgement on the sensory side of things until it is at the drinking stage where i am more experienced.

cheers again to all for the answers given earlier.

 

[Tahoose]

Interesting, I'd dare say that the champagne yeast should attenuate even more than it has already, I would think it would be closer to a Saison type yeast than a regular ale yeast. These can get really low.

Talking to a guy a while back and he asked me if I ever made a beer with a champagne yeast and I have always thought I'd give it a try at some point...

 

[SergeMarx]

I'd leave it a good few weeks to see how far down it goes - though if you're kegging at least bottle bombs wont' be an issue