Vigorosity

First of all, I finally found a free Internet based radio station that plays good reggae that's not either 1)utter crap, 2)not really reggae, 3)riddled with inane advertising, 4)sux. And, they list the tracks so you can buy that shit and not just be a leech. Seriously, I've been jamming it for at least an hour, and not one stinker in the bunch. Rockas!

So getcherself on over to KILLABASSound radio right now while you're reading this blog. If you don't like real roots selecta-style reggae then fuck it. Watch this video about bubbles instead.

Yup, that's my super genki Kolsch yeast having themselves a massive orgy (which should have a killa reggae soundtrack going with it by now), eating sugar and crapping out carbon dioxide and pissing alcohol and generally not giving a f****ck.

For this past weekend's brew I tried a new bathtub-oriented chilling regimen, as you can see in this picture:

Note the door going from the beer chilling/shower room out onto the mash tun & brew kettle hosing/balcony area. Now you know why we moved here.

The bucket that the pre-chiller is in is filled with ice water. The chilled water is then circulated through a coiled immersion chiller in the BK. We can do two loads of laundry with the waste water that goes into the tub. We pump it out with a pump that's conveniently included with our washing machine. Gotta respect that. Come on.

This system cooled down the wort about 20 minutes faster than previous non-pre-chilled style, but not faster than the previous batch which was done with the new uber-efficient wort chiller. Why, you may ask, if you care? Well, I found that in order for the pre-chiller to really be effective, the brewer needs to make sure that the water coming out of the faucet is on the coldest possible setting, and not and the LUKEWARMEST possible one, where I accidentally had it. DOY! So it did get down to pitching temps in under an hour--but got stuck at 26 this time. I wanted to get it down to 18. Oh well, as you can see in the vid, the yeast loved those warm tropical conditions and are busy gettin' all Sodom -n- Gemorrah on that azz.

I racked a previous beer off of some White Labs Kolsch yeast and kegged it, then carefully transfered the yeast cake to a clean fermenter which I stored in the 18C fermbox you see in the vid, until my wheat brew was done cooling and ready to pitch. Pitched it at about 22C (warm wort onto cooler yeast), and within an hour it was going like you see in the vid up there. Hotcha-mama! That was the fastest most vigorestest ferment I've ever seen in this house. Heh.

Now two days later there's no activity. I'm a bit worried about getting weird off flavors from the rapid ferment. I've heard the yeast can produce strange stuff under those conditions (ethanol and CO2 being but two of a vast array of compounds that yeast fart out during the course of a typical yeast orgy). I'll give it a couple more days to clean up and take a sample to see if it's attenuated and ready for the fruit. Oh yeah, this is a raspberry wheat. Once fermentation is done I'll chuck it onto a kilo or so of raspberries and let it do its thing for a few more days before kegging. Never done this before, and there are some issues I'm wondering about, but that's a topic for another post. In the meantime feast your i's on this:

The chest freezer is currently housing its max of 3 kegs and a CO2 bottle, plus a couple of bottled beers. I've only got the one set of tubing though, so that's an area for improvement. I need to maintain secrecy about what's in the kegs because of an upcoming national competition I've entered, but I'll definitely fill you in on that later. Okay, one more pic, me at the Hard Rock Cafe in Ueno, Tokyo, trying to concentrate on pouring a Sam Adams while being monitored by a Russian gremlin: