Clearning the Air, and the Ale

Since it came out well, it's time to review the operational elements of this Winter batch of dark & funky ale.  Clearing the ale always takes longer than I recall because cleaning up takes time.

These things require moving around the mash in the most sanitary way possible, which means air, light and surfaces are potential enemies of your ale.  The less exposure, the better.  Surfaces are the most controllable, so it's important to clean, reclean and clean again anything that comes to touch the juice. The rule is, just when you think it's been cleaned, clean and rinse it again. Yeast is a very finicky house guest.  You need to change the sheets and wipe around the bowl, or it won't stay the night.  So whatever bottle you drain off the wort, leaving the dead yeast in the pale, make sure it's food grade sanitary clean, or however you'd like to call it.  I use a cap of bleach per gallon, and or good, no rinse brewing cleaners (which have to sit for 20 minutes).

As much as I like the overpriced glass carboys from the brew supply stores, big, light, spring water bottles (without the BPA) aren't a bad alternative.  Of course, they are not something you can pour boiling water into to clean, so bleach/cleansers are vital here.



Here's what's left in the pale when the wort it's drained off, leaving the dearly departed yeast behind.  What's comes next is cleaning, recleaning and cleaning again.  And when done, you guessed it, time to clean again, without using anything abrasive to scratch he inside of your food grade pale, unless you want to just fill it with potting soil and use it for growing Kale, because scratches break places for things to grow that will highjack your next batch of whatever... so the theory goes.  

Of course, it makes one wonder what those Belgians do with old gnarly wood casks that actually cultivate the kind of things we're so paranoid to avoid.  I'm sure microbiologists have ready answers, but for now, I'm staying Mr. Clean when it comes to the

And of course, there is the "pour-back" phase, into the clean clean clean pale, which brings air back to he wort.  When done, I added a little more dry ale yeast (Nottingham, 'cause I luv her), and a little more fermentable sugar, in the form of honey, because it's sanitary but definition, since no bacteria can live on it's tightly bound cellular bonds (as it's been explained to me at the brew club), making it the lazy boy's sugar of choice to keep the ale moving forward before the bottle aging phase.  After filling the pale back up and capping it off, we popped it back in a chilly spot (49-55 F degrees on average), off the concrete floor, on wood. 

The ingredients are a separate matter and this batch included a whole bunch of stuff you'll find listed on the post-it note, including a can of Coopers dark malted ale, a pound of medium dark malt, a half pound of honey, more barley malt and some pumpkin, both roasted and canned pumpkin.  

It's got two kinds of hops, including Chanook from Hop Union and Willamette hop pellets that came from the brew supplier in one old kit or another, which I added, and re-added to taste.

At bottling, I used white pine needles for a portion of he batch, in the spirit winter and of gruit, the bitter compound of choice before hops were widely adopted as the flavorful work around against med-evil church tax codes that placed a fee on the use of gruit for bittering of ales.