Racking

Well, my beer blew through its first stage of fermentation. This is the stage where the yeast eats sugar and puts out alcohol (and some other byproducts). At this point, the beer is ready to condition for a few weeks, giving the yeast time to consume their initial byproducts and flesh things out a bit.

At this exact moment the beer is 4.1% alcohol by volume, which is a bit better than I’d hoped. I was projecting 3.8% or something. (I started off a bit lighter than I had wanted, so a bit heavier is good.)

I’ve tasted it and compared with some of the unfermented stuff I saved and refrigerated. The beer tastes much less sweet now. It’s quite bitter actually. (I am not sure if that is going to be tempered by the aging process, but it is possible that I over-hopped the beer a bit.) It is certainly not undrinkable. The taste of it right now is sort of like a greenish cask-condition ale. Actually, it is a greenish cask-condition ale. Give it two weeks and you could serve it at the Arrow and Loon.

Anyway, it’s been transferred to a new container (a glass carboy) to get it off the dead yeast cells and brewing sludge that it was in when it was in the plastic bin. It looks mighty nice I have to say.

Next time I’ll stop a bit sooner in the transfer. As you can see, some of the sludge made it. But a lot more was removed, so I’m not going to get excited about that.

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