Trub Ale
I hosted a big brew day in my backyard and lots of people made lots of beer (well, wort, anyway). Ian produced 10gal of all-grain IPA which he gave away half. I stayed home with a gallon of the the very last bits. I call it my Trub Ale.
| Style | IPA |
| Yeast | Safbrew S-33 |
| Original S.G. | 1.054 |
| Current S.G. | 1.028 |
| ABV | 3.5% |
I haven't been treating this one very good. For starters, after the brew day I stuck the capped gallon jug in the fridge for four days because I didn't have any yeast to pitch.
Then, on the 11th, I pitched a packet of Safbrew S-33 yeast. The next day the ale was fermenting so vigorously it blew the blow-off tube's stopper out of the jug! This is the second time this has happened to me. I'm going to have to solve this problem. Finally, on the 13th, the SG was only 1.030 so I added some of the yeast starter I made to kick-start the Winter Warmer to this trub ale. Couldn't hurt.
[Friday, October 26] After two weeks in the primary (which was probably 30% lees) I finally racked this ale. Rack is probably too nice a term for the horror I put it through. Firstly, the racking device I have doesn't work at all on this small 1gal jug. So I just poured the ale into a clean 5gal carboy, cleaned the 1gal jug, and then poured it back into the smaller vessel. At this point, I don't honestly expect much out of this. I need to come up with a better racking system. Perhaps an auto-siphon would do me good.
[Monday, December 31] Yes, an auto-siphon worked perfectly. I racked the beer into a bottling bucket, cleaned and sanitized several 12oz bottle and bottled the beer. I made up a priming solution consisting of .9oz of dextrose and a half cup of water (boiled, natch). I forgot to take a SG reading before I racked the beer into the bucket, so my final gravity reading is probably a bit higher than it ought to be, yielding a slightly higher alcohol content. But since the fermentation was lackluster, anyway, I'm not overly worried. I'll just be happy if it doesn't taste like crap.