Now that the you've made wort from the grains and boiled it with hops, it's time to move the wort to the fermenter. At 2JBC, we have spent a lot of time on the cold side of the brewing process. Brewers spend a lot of time fielding questions about RIMS tubes, mashing techniques, and hop spiders; however, it is the cold side that really stands out to us as the game changer. Cooling the wortOnce the time is up on your boil, most people begin cooling their wort as fast as possible. However, at 2JBC, we take an additional step to Whirlpool our beer for 10 minutes and let it sit for another 10 minutes to coagulate the proteins in the wort and separate the trub from the clear wort. After the whirlpool is complete, we then begin to cool our wort as quickly as possible and lower the temperature for fermentation to begin. We have tried many types of wort chilling including ice baths, immersion chiller (a copper chiller that uses water to chill the wort), plate chiller (water runs in one direction over the plates while wort runs over the plates in the opposite direciton to cool the wort), and a counterflow chiller (similar to a plate chiller but there are coils instead of plates the water and wort pass over). All have pros and cons, but we have settled on the Brutus Counterflow chiller from Exchilerator. Using the Exchilerator, we have been able to cool down our wort in 10-15 minutes and get the wort to pitching temperatures very quickly in a closed system (i.e., the wort leaves the kettle and no longer touches air). Once the wort is cooled and in the fermenter, we connect either the SS Brewtech Chronicals or the Sanke fermenters to the glychol chiller. We then pitch our yeast, hookup a blowoff tube, and then wait for fermentation to start. The blowoff tube is a piece of silicone tube attached to an opening in the fermenter that allows C02 created during fermentation to escape the fermenter. I know, I know. You heard that oxygen is bad for beer. No...you haven't? Well, oxygen is bad for beer. Oxidized beer creates an off flavor that tastes and smells like wet cardboard or old wine (yeah, there is a guy that probably tasted cardboard to know the flavor). Well, the reason the beer doesn't become oxidized is that the other end of the blowoff tube is put into a bucket filled with sanitizer. The C02 from the fermentation mixed with the closed end in sanitizer creates an environment that prevents oxygen from reaching the wort. When fermentation starts, the sanitizer will actually bubble due to the C02 created during active fermentation. After fermentation ends, the beer is transferred to either kegs or bottles. fermentersWhen we first started brewing, we transferred our beer to plastic buckets to ferment in a dark spot in our garage. We quickly realized that beer likes a constant temperature, so we upgraded to a fermentation chamber (i.e., a temperature controlled freezer) and glass carboys. However, Mike got tired really quickly of lifting glass carboys with 5 gallons of liquid into a freezer, so we upgraded to SS Brewbuckets. After buying our brew buckets, we decided to find a way to brew lager beers that require colder fermentation. We settled on Sanke kegs that we modified with 6 inch ferrules (easy to clean) with Cool Zone wraps. At first, we pumped cold water through the wraps and changed out ice constantly. When we moved to a glychol chiller, we were able to really "set it and forget it" with our fermentation. We are now fully transferring our beer in a closed system to minimize oxygenation of the beer. We now have six Sanke fermenters and two 1 barrel Chronicals to ferment in. We have since gotten rid of our glass carboys and plastic buckets; however, we still have our 7.5 gallon SS Brewtech Brewbuckets that we have since added a thermowell to help monitor the temperature (we use the Cool Zone wraps for these). Today, we use our fermenters to brew 5, 10, and 20 gallon batches. How to serveAt 2JBC, we have not bottle conditioned beer where priming sugar is added to the bottle so that the beer can develop C02 (i.e. bubbles!). Instead of bottle conditioning, we have always transferred to a keg and force carbonated beer with a C02 tank. Once the keg has enough C02 dissolved in the beer, the C02 is used to push the beer out of the keg and into your glass. At 2JBC, we made keezers to transfer our beer instead of using a purchased kegerator. We also have a storage chamber that allows us to store beer under C02 pressure to be ready to serve when one keg taps out. We also now have several other service types--an Oktober canning machine so that we can easily bring our homebrews camping or golfing and a jockey box that allows us to serve at competitions. Now that we are entering competitions, we need to learn how to bottle beer (from the keg, not bottle conditioned) so that we can ship our beers to competitions which seems to be the preferred method for judging competition beers. This is a beginning guide to our process. If you have any questions, please reach out. We are always happy to help fellow or future brewers and provide any help we can.
We'll see you next week when we go over how to read a recipe! Cheers! 2JBC
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AuthorTwo Jacks Brewers Archives
May 2024
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