The brewery has been commissioned this week to brew some beer for a party. Something relatively mainstream was called for, so we settled on an amber. The recipe was based upon Fat Tire Amber ale, Boont Amber from Anderson Valley, McNeill’s Firehouse Amber, and Firestone Double Barrel Ale. The grist was pale, a couple of pounds of crystal, biscuit, Munich, and a touch of aromatic malt. Original gravity was 1.057 and the IBUs are right around 40. Luckily, the anti-foam I ordered last week arrived, so we were able to use it in the fermentation. Initial reports are good, it actually prevented the foam from building up and coming out of the top of the primary during the wort aeration, thus enabling us to aerate for much longer than usual, which in turn should help the yeast attenuate further.

The hop bomb we brewed last week was racked to secondary, both yeasts having some trouble with the high gravity (1.073), only dropping out to the mid-1.020s. The beer will have to stay at warmer temperatures for a week or more to help it drop. Then cold conditioning will help clarify it. We also kegged up the Son of Satan Stout that has been in the cylindro- conical fermenter for the last month. We were rather short on volume, getting about 4 gallons in one corny and somewhat less, perhaps 3 and 3/4 gallons in the other corny. There was about half a gallon of yeast slurry in the cone that plugged and would not exit through the ball valve. I think the conical would fare much better with a normal gravity beer, and some if not all of our problems might be attributable to experimenting with it for the first time on an 1.105 imperial stout.