First (recent) Kit: considerations and recount

[StoutWolf]

This might be a bit of a long read, so I hope you've got a glass of good beer to hand to help you through.

As a few of you have seen in my introduction thread, I've previously made a few kit beers, but that was 20+ years ago. Since then, I've drunk a lot of beer, but made none, despite saying many, many times that I wanted to change that. Recently a few things have really inspired me to commit to getting back into brewing:

• Sampling some good country wines made by a plot holder at our allotments and realising that rather than buying yet another freezer to store produce gluts I could turn them into alcohol,
• Watching a video clip of someone using an immersion heater to maintain fermentation temperatures,
• Reading about wine making and more widely researching home brewing and discovering kit tweaking, extract brewing and simple all grain brewing setups.

Thing is, I'm a reasonably competent cook and I enjoy adapting recipes to get them how I like. Back when I was brewing before, I never realised this was possible for home brew. I thought kits made according to instructions was all that was attainable without a garage sized brewing space and huge investment in micro-brewery scale equipment. Most of the stouts I made were acceptable, certainly drinkable but all suffered to some extent from homebrew taste and being drunk younger than they should have been. Because of this, none quite matched up to how I wanted them to taste or had the body I liked in commercial stouts.

Space, and more critically somewhere with a stable temperature suitable for a fermenting vessel was the main thing that had prevented me starting to brew again. Our house is small, and we have a lot of stuff. Further, our kitchen is in a thin walled north facing single storey extension. At night and in winter, the temperature plummets!

So, having decided to give brewing another go, the best place to start seemed to be a beer kit and a moderate investment in equipment. That meant bottles and more specifically saving beer bottles. I settled on a plum porter that I was enjoying, that came in attractive bottles and drank it exclusively for a while to satisfy my need to have 40 identical beer bottles. Not much of a hardship there! However, at the same time some of my research reminded me how much faff bottling entails.

When drawing up my list of equipment I tried to make sure I covered the basics, but also needed to address my temperature concerns and add a few 'luxuries' to take some of the pain I remembered out of bottling. I ended up with this:

• Plastic bucket fermenting vessel with lid
• Airlock
• LCD adhesive thermometer
• Paddle
• Hydrometer
• No rinse sanitiser
• Immersion heater

• Second FV with lid, airlock, tap and little bottler
• Easy start siphon with FV clips
• Cleaner sanitiser
• Bottle washer
• Bottle drying rack
• Crown caps
• Capper

• Beerkit
• Lactose

Having decided what I wanted, I found a supplier who had everything in stock (minimal compromise), good reviews and who used a reliable courier. I'm sure I could have got it cheaper if I'd shown a little more patience or compromised further. I could have made do without some of the bottling luxuries, but overall decided I could accept ~ £4 a pint for this first batch, being that I wouldn't be paying pub prices anytime soon. It also gave what I thought was a good basic setup to address my temperature concerns and to which I could add extras as needed.

A second kit would be all that was needed to drop the price per bottle of the initial outlay to ~£2 a bottle or not far off the cost of the plum porters I was drinking whilst writing the list.

When it came to choosing the kit, the decision made itself, the attractive plum porter bottles were from St. Peters Brewery, the cream stout kit from them seemed to have been well liked by many on here and was in stock with the chosen supplier. However, the desire for fuller bodied stouts from my youthful brewing attempt has remained part of my taste and I saw it suggested in numerous places that lactose was good to include in a brew to ensure this.

Part of the thinking behind the additional bottling-oriented fermenter was to allow me to rack off of the trub, batch prime and then:

• Bottle some (half?) of the stout 'vanilla'
• Add lactose to the remainder and bottle a further amount
• Add flavouring(s)(espresso / cherry) to the remainder and bottle

My thinking here was to try and reduce the time (number of kits) needed to assess some of the tweaks I might like to implement with the kit. So, here's my first question to anyone who's shown the dedication to read this far. Is this a good idea? Any reason why I should reconsider?

I also read somewhere that the lactose will increase the amount of conditioning time required. So I'd probably aim to sample my way through half of the virgin stout first before then taste testing a bottle of each variety over a period of time to assess which to base future brews on and how long it needs to condition for.

So much for the planning, now for the practice...

The order arrived last week in good time and condition from the supplier. Happily, I was on annual leave, booked in 2019 and now no longer being used as intended! Which meant on Wednesday afternoon (22nd) I could jump straight in and follow the meagre instructions on the kit packaging... Perhaps not as well as I should have!

Sterilisation went smoothly, as you would expect with new kit. Warming contents and getting them mixed up in fermenting vessel with correct quantity of water also went fine except... The temperature on the LCD thermometer looked higher than it should have been by a degree or two. At this stage I wished I'd bought a standard thermometer as well since I was finding reading the LCD difficult (something I’ve since resolved). I let it cool a bit and added the hop oils.

With hindsight I suspect I should have put a lid on and left it cool for a while longer. In my enthusiasm though, what I did was, pitch the yeast. The kit instructions then say leave to stand for 4-6 days at 18-20°C.

So here goes with my second question (Congratulations for sticking with it this far, need another drink yet?): I believe this 18-20°C is air temperature, rather than liquid temperature. The guidance that accompanied my immersion heater was that liquid temperatures will be a few degrees higher due to the action of the yeast and for most home brewing applications I should leave it set at the factory set 24°C. Does this seem reasonable? Or have I kept it too high throughout the primary? I guess if I have, I may get some strange flavours (esters?)

Having pitched the yeast, it took maybe 12 hours to get going (I fretted at first, but was reassured after reading about respiration periods of 12 hours and slower starts using un-rehydrated dried hops). It then built a really healthy looking (as far as I could tell quickly cracking the lid of the opaque FV) 4-5 inches of Krausen and went really fast for a period of 36 hours or so. Since when it’s slowed gradually and considerably to now be an occasional bubble through the airlock.

My immersion heater is cabled through the airlock bung and sits in the fermentation vessel rather than in a water bath. I did have one further slight panic around day 4 when it seemed to go suddenly from regular bubbling to none, but I found a slight leak between cable and bung which I blocked with a smear of food grease and normal service resumed.

The instructed 4-6 days is up (8), but not the more commonly accepted 14 days that I’ve read on here. I was thinking of taking hydrometer readings from Saturday onwards. Final questions for this post (Superb effort if you’ve read this far by the way, many thanks) – Am I best doing this by taking a sample using a siphon and trial jar (all sterilised)? Does the sample get returned to the FV after?

Cheers,
:small

 

[phillc]

Nice write up. Seems to me that everything is going quite smoothly. Good fermentation, no problem.

I can't answer all your questions, but regarding the sampling, I wouldn't do it. If you think you'll leave the beer in the fermenter for 14 days, leave it for 14 days and then take a sample for a final gravity reading.

Unless you have a bottom tap or sampling port, every time you open the fermenter and siphon for a sample, you increase the risk of oxidisation and infection.

Often the best thing to do in homebrewing is nothing.

The relevant temperature is the liquid temperature. This is obviously somewhat correlated with the air temperature if you aren't actively heating or cooling the liquid in the fermenter.

I don't return my final sample to the fermenter before bottling. I tend to drink it, as an early taste test.

 

[StoutWolf]

Thanks very much for taking the time to read and advise. I think I'm minded to leave it for the 14 days then. I did wonder (belatedly) whether I should have had a tap on the primary fermentor.

 

[phillc]

You can always add a tap in the fermenter bucket for the next brew. Sounds like you're enjoying the process and there will be more brews

 

[Paul Roberts]

All sounds good, don’t worry about bubbling or lack of, it’s still doing it’s thing.
How were you going to add cherry flavour? A cherry stout sounds good to me

 

[StoutWolf]

Thanks both, there will undoubtedly be more brews, but I need to 'create' some more bottles first.
For the cherry flavour, I'm thinking of cheating and using a MJ boost.

 

[StoutWolf]

I bottled this yesterday, mostly according to the plan. However:

• I was unlikely to 'create' enough bottles quickly enough to allow me to start a second brew back to back, and,
• I'm impatient and didn't want to wait before having a good taste.

So I succumbed to a case of shiny kit acquisition syndrome and invested in an early birthday present to myself of a dark farm bar in a box kit. Customer service and delivery was top quality and top speed. So far I'm very happy with both my purchase, and my first brew, especially given its youth and force carbonated state.
15 days from kit to glass. 9 pints to see me through the bank holiday weekend and a beerworks bitter kit to start in the next day or two.