Homebrew – Irish Stout
Having been a fan of beer for some time now, I recently decided it was high time to stop relying on the labors of others and give homebrewing a shot. So last weekend, armed with the latest in beginner brewing kits and aided by an experienced friend, I embarked on what what would be a weekend wrought with numerous close calls and ultimately destined for catastrophic failure.
Overall, I'd have to say the actual process of brewing went quite well. There was a pretty close call boiling the wort (which is simply the beer with malts and grains but without the yeast added in just yet), however it was caught in time and thus a ginormous mess was averted. Apparently boil overs at this stage often take hours to clean up as the malts in the wort tend to be quite sticky when it dries on surfaces. Somewhere around this stage (I don't recall exactly when, hence the need for experienced friends to aid in brewing as I'm morally opposed to reading the directions) it came time to add the hops. I gather that one is typically supposed to steep hops in a bag and remove them, however my starter kit only had one bag which I had already used for grains at this point so I decided to just leave the hope in. I suspect this may have been a mistake.
So after boiling, one has to chill the wort as quickly as possible. At some point I need to get my hands on a wort chiller, which is a coiled copper pipe you sterilize and submerge in the wort as soon as it comes off the stove. You can then hook up one end of the chiller to a cold water source and the other goes into your preferred waste water disposal system. Anyway since I don't have one of those, I just filled the sink with ice water, plopped the wort pot in and added some ice to the wort, whcih worked pretty well.
Aeration followed soon after adding the young, wonderful smelling stout into my 5 gallon carboy. The starting gravity reading was almost exactly where it should be and I sprinkled on my dry yeast, plugged it up with an airlock which allows excess carbon dioxide to escape, set it under the stairs in my newly designated fermentation station and treked off to a bar to enjoy the fruits of others' labor. Upon my return, I was surprised to discover a vigorous bubbling in the airlock as this typically takes a full day or two to begin. Being delighted by the exuberance of my yeast, I went to bed happy. The next morning, the beer in the carboy was visibly stirring... something I hadn't seen before, and the fluid in the airlock was discolored with beer. I again took this as a sign that the temperature was ideal and that things were moving along quite nicely. A few hours later, the top to the airlock popped, but just enough to allow the krausen (foamy head) to kind of bleed out, releasing a lot of built of pressure. So after about an hour of that, I resterilized the airlock, popped it back on, and went about my business.
Around 11pm that night, I was upstairs in my room minding my own business and heard a loud pop, followed by the sound of water rushing or perhaps a fire extinguisher being set off. I ran downstairs to discover a very confused roommate who had just gotten home staring at a geyser of beer spraying roughly 5 feet into the low ceiling beneath the stairs. I'm not sure exactly what happened; my roommate says his dog was sniffing around there and may have poked the airlock. I suspect in addition to that, some of the hops I probably should have removed earlier may have been forced into the airlock and clogged it, causing a pretty significant buildup of pressure. Whatever the cause, my neighbors downstairs weren't all that happy to find black liquid dripping through the ceiling in their bathroom... although I'm comforted by the fact that it was an Irish Stout as my neighbors are some of the most Irish people I have ever met, so no harm done.
Anyway, I've got the ingredients for a "Superior Strong Ale" on order along with some reusable hop bags so I'll be trying again in a week or two (this time with a blowoff tube and bucket for my primary fermenter).