Sunday, April 26, 2009

Bottled a butter bomb

So I bottled up Van Den Heuv Ale yesterday. While I don't think the beer got infected, I'm not sure it's going to turn out ok... it was laden with diacetyl. Diacetyl is a normal by-product of yeast, but one that the yeast should re-absorb on their own. It is likely that I racked the beer to secondary too soon, resulting in the remaining yeast being unable to re-absorb the remaining diacetyl. The problems is... diacetly can also be a side affect of a Pediococcu or Lactobacillus infection. So it's entirely possible that this beer did get infected... though I have a tendency to doubt that, mainly because all of my previous infections have been very obvious in primary and resulted in very vinegary/sour flavors. At least if this was an infection, it's a different one! On the off-chance that this is infected though, I need to be very careful with the bottles, they could be "bottle-bombs" waiting to go off! I really should put them in a plastic tub...

I did ask for some advice regarding whether there is anything I can do to reduce or eliminate the diacetyl on brewboard.com. It seems that if I keep the bottles in the 70°F range the yeast should be able to re-absorb some of the diacetyl while they eat up the priming sugar and carbonate, assuming the yeast is still healthy... which brings me to another point...

While I was at the Red Salamander the other day I was asking Karl how much sugar exactly to use, since it's been quite a while since I've bottled a beer. He said 5oz is the magic number for 5 gallons of beer. So I asked him, since I only had 4.5 gallons of beer, tops, should I use 4.5oz? He suggested that instead of reducing the amount of sugar, I should increase the amount of water I boil the sugar in to increase the total volume of beer... not a bad idea I thought! Well now I'm not so sure... I siphoned my beer into the bottling bucket after pouring my 3 or so quarts of boiling sugar water into the bottling bucket. Well obviously the beer was much cooler than the boiling water, and I'm afraid I may have killed off some of my yeast! I mean there were still wisps of steam coming off of the top of the beer after it had all siphoned in... By the math, my beer should have been a little less than 80°F when it was all mixed, but I'm a little worried. Oh well, not much I can do now but wait!

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