Some of you attended the 2nd ever “OpenBrew” at my place a few weeks ago. (The 1st one was held at Blurry’s place in July of 2007, as I recall…) Well, I decided it would be informative to post a few pics of the beers in action, especially for those of you who missed the OpenBrew session. The beers are already racked and kegged, so these pictures are from a few weeks ago. Enjoy!
Three carboys and a food-grade plastic fermenter. The cider is probably the simplest in terms of work, but takes the longest. The cider in this photo started as 5 gallons of Trader Joe’s Apple Cider (no preservatives! very important!) Results have been good with their cider. The other beers were all “extract” brews. Some used specialty grains to obtain extra character. The “Oatmeal Stout” used oats, chocolate malt (which doesn’t actually contain chocolate), roasted barley, and a little black malt. I have no recollection what was put in the pale ale, but we dry hopped it with Goldings hops last weekend. The Red Ale came out not-so-red. It was a “kit” brew, so I’m not entirely surprised. It still tasted fine when we transferred it to the keg, though.
A close-up of the cider fermenting. Notice how much CO2 is being produced at the top. Very little foam. The camera even caught a CO2 bubble as it was escaping through the airlock.
The Pale Ale produced a lot of foam compared to the cider or the oatmeal stout. Normally this would be a problem in a 5 gallon carboy and would require a tube coming out of the top and run down into a water jug to capture the blow-off (sticky floors suck), but this is a 6 gallon carboy, so there is more than enough room for the foam.
In this picture, the hard cider has finished fermenting and has been racked into a clean/sanitized secondary fermenter. It should be very obvious that one of the benefits of this is that it gives the cider time to settle out and clarify. It also gives more time for any sulfur flavors/odors to leave the cider as well as let the flavor age/mature.
Once these beers are mature and ready, we will have a follow-up session where we can all drink and enjoy them. Yum!
El Brew Ho says: I think Blurry’s OpenBrew was earlier, like late April or May (I think mid May). The brews were well conditioned and served at Firefly, so it was about six weeks earlier at a guess. As I recall the Sox were getting rained on at Fenway while we were cooking burgers under sunny skies just a few miles away, so maybe those were April showers, but I’d bet it was a week or two into May.
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