A painful lesson in heartbreak
I have been waiting for weeks to make a batch of beer. For my birthday I recieved a wort chiller from Sally and I have been waiting to try it out.
A wort chiller is basically a large coil of copper refridgerator pipe that acts as a heat exchanger to cool down my wort (what beer is before you add the yeast).
Well, I bought some 8.99 hose which promptly started to melt when I attached it to the wort chiller output hose (the hot hose). I switch hoses, turning my cheap hose into the cold hose and the better apartment hose into the hot hose. Problem averted. There is a learning curve when trying new things.
So I have 50 feet of hose coming and going into the house, and I am glad Sally left otherwise I am sure she wouldn't be too happy about the huge mess that this operation creates. The landlord drove by and asked me what the hell was going on (since I had a steady stream of water pouring out of my house). Once he figured out that the house wasn't flooded or I was draining a waterbed he drove off.
So after about 5 min of running water my pot isn't burning hot and the water comming out is roughly the same temperature as the water going in (so I think).
So I open the spigot on my pot to start pouring the wort into my carboy, and as I am feeling the hose it doesn't feel burning hot so I think the wort is pretty close to pitching (adding the yeast) temperature.
If it is too hot it will kill the yeast so you want to make sure that the wort is around 70 degrees.
So I shake the wort so it absorbs the oxygen and then I pitch the yeast and then put on the fermentation lock. I put the whole operation in my closet and start to clean the huge mess up.
When I check to see if fermentation has taken place I am shocked and dissapointed. My fermentation lock is empty, the beer sucked in the water in a complete revesal of what normally happens.
What normally happens is that the yeast start eating all the suger in the wort. But if air is being sucked into the bottle, this means that the yeast are not doing their job. And if the beer is sucking the water from my lock, which is filled with anti-bacterial acid, this means that my beer is poisining itself. Holy fuck!
So I add some more water and anti-bacterial in another fermentation lock (because I have a spare) since I think that my lock is malfunctioning. Well it isn't.
I feel the wort and it is hot. Which is weird. It will sometimes heat up as the yeast do their thing, but not to this extent. What I think happened is that the wort was too hot and I didn't realize it. When I added the yeast, maybe it was too hot and it killed them.
As the beer cooled, it sucked in the water as the hot air contracted. So this means that I could have a bunch of wort and no yeast, which is slightly contaminated by the anti-bacterial chemicals that got sucked into the wort through the lock.
I am bummed. I waited a month to make my beer and to test out my new toy. Now it looks like I didn't know what I was doing and killed millions of my friends, the yeast.
If worse comes to worse and fermentation doesn't start by tomorrow morning, I am just going to add a bunch of my nut brown ale yeast that I had left over from my last batch.
The yeast that I added were meant for this batch, but their experation date was on Feb 28th, 2008, so maybe they were bad to begin with. (When I defrosted them, they looked ok, so there was some live ones.) Maybe there just wasn't enough yeast to create pressure inside the bottle to counteract the air contraction of the cooling wort, maybe when I come home everything will be humming right along.
I have been making beer for awhile, but it is still a delicate mystery. Maybe it will never be clockwork, it seems that every batch has its own set of problems.
A wort chiller is basically a large coil of copper refridgerator pipe that acts as a heat exchanger to cool down my wort (what beer is before you add the yeast).
Well, I bought some 8.99 hose which promptly started to melt when I attached it to the wort chiller output hose (the hot hose). I switch hoses, turning my cheap hose into the cold hose and the better apartment hose into the hot hose. Problem averted. There is a learning curve when trying new things.
So I have 50 feet of hose coming and going into the house, and I am glad Sally left otherwise I am sure she wouldn't be too happy about the huge mess that this operation creates. The landlord drove by and asked me what the hell was going on (since I had a steady stream of water pouring out of my house). Once he figured out that the house wasn't flooded or I was draining a waterbed he drove off.
So after about 5 min of running water my pot isn't burning hot and the water comming out is roughly the same temperature as the water going in (so I think).
So I open the spigot on my pot to start pouring the wort into my carboy, and as I am feeling the hose it doesn't feel burning hot so I think the wort is pretty close to pitching (adding the yeast) temperature.
If it is too hot it will kill the yeast so you want to make sure that the wort is around 70 degrees.
So I shake the wort so it absorbs the oxygen and then I pitch the yeast and then put on the fermentation lock. I put the whole operation in my closet and start to clean the huge mess up.
When I check to see if fermentation has taken place I am shocked and dissapointed. My fermentation lock is empty, the beer sucked in the water in a complete revesal of what normally happens.
What normally happens is that the yeast start eating all the suger in the wort. But if air is being sucked into the bottle, this means that the yeast are not doing their job. And if the beer is sucking the water from my lock, which is filled with anti-bacterial acid, this means that my beer is poisining itself. Holy fuck!
So I add some more water and anti-bacterial in another fermentation lock (because I have a spare) since I think that my lock is malfunctioning. Well it isn't.
I feel the wort and it is hot. Which is weird. It will sometimes heat up as the yeast do their thing, but not to this extent. What I think happened is that the wort was too hot and I didn't realize it. When I added the yeast, maybe it was too hot and it killed them.
As the beer cooled, it sucked in the water as the hot air contracted. So this means that I could have a bunch of wort and no yeast, which is slightly contaminated by the anti-bacterial chemicals that got sucked into the wort through the lock.
I am bummed. I waited a month to make my beer and to test out my new toy. Now it looks like I didn't know what I was doing and killed millions of my friends, the yeast.
If worse comes to worse and fermentation doesn't start by tomorrow morning, I am just going to add a bunch of my nut brown ale yeast that I had left over from my last batch.
The yeast that I added were meant for this batch, but their experation date was on Feb 28th, 2008, so maybe they were bad to begin with. (When I defrosted them, they looked ok, so there was some live ones.) Maybe there just wasn't enough yeast to create pressure inside the bottle to counteract the air contraction of the cooling wort, maybe when I come home everything will be humming right along.
I have been making beer for awhile, but it is still a delicate mystery. Maybe it will never be clockwork, it seems that every batch has its own set of problems.