Nothing Happens At Ten

Enough with the attempts at humor. I am back to beer. Yesterday I put up 5 gallons of my Amber Ale to ferment, but this time I did it differently. This time I am trying out the primary fermentation in The Bucket.

That is not just any bucket, that is a special Brewing Bucket from the beer store. It holds 7.8 gallons instead of the piddly 6 gallons that the carboy holds. It still has a teeny tiny little blowby hose, but this time there is way more headspace over the beer to keep the beer snot inside of the bucket. My brew friends told me that this will fix my problem with the beer snot getting out of the fermenter.

And to be safe, this time I went directly to the bolt to keep the end of the hose in control.

It’s all good.

OK. That was the theory. Here is the reality.

One day later.

The hose and the bucket are full of beer snot again.

It isn’t as bad as last time, but it is still pretty nasty.

The pressure in this thing is intense. I had to tape the hose onto the top because there is nothing there to tie it to.

Looks like there is some leakage anyway. And now that I look at it, check out that bulge!

Yikes! I hope this one doesn’t blow out like the bung did. That could make a mess.

Isn’t this exciting?

The new beer is in the bottles.

We got 50 bottles of beer out of this batch, and it didn’t taste sour and it didn’t get siphoned onto the floor (mostly). In fact, the bottling went very smoothly with minimal spillage and spoilage….. so OK… that’s boring…. so forget about the beer.

Take a look at this!

That is a plant! Really! It jumped into the shopping cart at the plant show… or so I’m told. I did not hear whether it was growling at the time. I turned it over to see what it is. Check this out.

Google that and see what it means!

Hey look! Here is a photo of a neighborhood cat sitting on the patio.

HAHAHA. I crack myself up.

Anyway, so, now we have a killer plant named “Reginald”. Scary, hunh?

I am looking for a place to hide my beer, as I suspect that this thing might have an interest in it…. and it might even have the capacity to pop the caps.

Today I managed to rack the beer from the primary fermenter to the secondary fermenter. That is technical beer jargon for siphoning the beer out of the nasty, crusty, jug that exploded…. into a nice, clean bottle so it can finish fermenting and clarifying without sitting around in all that crud.

Here is the beer all settled down for a week in its new home.

Sounds simple, huh? Unfortunately, getting there was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. I didn’t get any photos of the “interesting” parts of the process because it was more “interesting” than I thought it would be, and that kept me too busy to take pictures.

First of all, getting the siphon to start took a few tries sucking on the hose until I was covered in beer (at least the beer wasn’t sour like last time). For some reason that is always more interesting than it should be. I wasn’t drinking any beer… really…. honest…. I was starting the siphon.

Then, at some point after I got the siphon working, the siphon hose popped out of the carboy and started siphoning the beer onto the kitchen floor.

Even though I popped the hose right back into the bottle, by the time that was done we had initiated the kitchen floor with a pint or so of raw beer.

It was interesting trying to clean up the spill so we would not track it through the house while still managing to keep the siphon going and keeping the hose confined to the bottle for the duration.

We did get the beer transferred with some minor losses.

Here is a photo of the bottom of the shoe that is still sticking to the floor in the kitchen.

We will have to address that issue with another mopping at some point.

After that I was faced with cleaning out the muck from the other carboy.

It was a daunting task because it took a half hour with a scrub brush just to get that junk out of Dad’s Beer Bucket, and there is no way to get a scrub brush into the carboy. Scroll down a couple of days in this blog and you can see what was in Dad’s Beer Bucket. Yuk.

No scrub brushes can go into the plastic carboy because they will scratch it, so I used this instead.

That is a Carboy Cleaner. The electric drill is used to spin it around inside of the carboy, and when it is spinning, the blue pads on the left side spin apart and scrub down the sides of the bottle. According to the salesman (what could possibly go wrong with that?) the blue pads are guaranteed not to scratch the plastic carboy.

The stopper that came with the Carboy Cleaner is too small for the neck on the plastic carboy, so I had to cobble together a larger stopper for it.

I drilled a hole in the big plug and stuffed the little plug into the hole in the big plug and then I stuffed the big plug with the little plug stuffed into it into the carboy neck and then I held the whole thing together with Tenacity while I spun up the Carboy Cleaner. Hey. It worked.

So after soaking the inside of the carboy with a solution of B-Brite® and water, I spun up the Carboy Cleaner, and the beer snot crud came off. Here is the top of the carboy where all the beer snot was stuck.

Not bad! Looks nice. After my interesting morning with the beer stuff, at least the cleaning equipment worked.

Next week we will put the beer into the bottles.

Let’s hope that it is a boring adventure next time.