Jeez – just a little more than 48 hours later, the Belgian Strong Golden is all but done! The airlock is only bubbling about once every 30 seconds and there’s a huge yeast cake on the bottom of the carboy. Tomorrow morning I’ll give the carboy a swirl (yea, I’m a swirler:) to re-suspend the yeast and hope to get a couple more points off the final gravity. I’ll not rush this ale out of glass, so it’ll sit on the yeast for at least ten days, if not longer.
On a completely different note, when I woke up Saturday morning, eager to brew the Belgian Strong, I noticed that one of my eyes was red – like a small blood vessel had burst, but it didn’t look too bad. My eyes are often pretty funky looking and red after taking a shower, so I didn’t think a whole lot about it. But within an hour or so it kinda blossomed (if you look carefully at Saturday’s pictures you can see it:) and over the next day it started looking pretty bad. Brenda suggested that if it didn’t get better I ought to call the optometrist’s office and see what they had to say. By Sunday, it looked bad and I had pretty well decided to call the eye Doc on Monday morning.
I called this morning and they reassured me that the burst blood vessel wasn’t dangerous, or even that urgent, but I could come in if I was worried. A strange coincidence, I’d planned on getting an appointment for a regular check-up this week since I’m on spring break. Of course, they had no last minute appointments available, but put me on the “call list.” Well, I got a call about 3:00 p.m. today saying that they had a cancellation for 4:00 p.m., so I jumped at the opportunity:)
The doctor looked at it, laughed (he’s an old family friend:), and said I had a good one indeed!
It may take as long as a month for all the blood to drain out and make the eye look normal again. Great…
Tomorrow is a full day. We drop Brenda’s Jag off in Livermore to get worked on, I have a leather jacket to return to Wilsons in Pleasanton, then it’s off to EJ Phair (they currently have Drakes IPA and Schooners IPA as guest handles – yum!) in Concord – and a quick trip to MoreBeer. Once we pick up Brenda’s car, we’re heading down to Redwood City and the Paul Thorn show. Life is good!
The obligatory pre-brew photo…
The mash-in went perfectly! We hit 149 degrees on the mark.
Once we looked at just how much a bag of cane sugar is, we both decided to back off from 6 pounds of sugar to 5 pounds.
Per Jamil, we’re doing an extended mash – 80 minutes.
The OG seemed a little low after the sparge (pre-boil) at 1.036, but we still have a ninety minute boil to go, not to mention five pounds of cane sugar:)
Sampling the style we’re brewing…
It’s in glass! OG is 1.084…
I was really worried about the 1388 yeast. I made the starter Wednesday evening and never saw any activity. When I got up Thursday, nothing was going on. I cooled the starter so the yeast would drop out and by late Thursday evening, there was a really nice yeast cake on the bottom of the flask. I fed the starter about 400 ml of wort on Friday morning and it took off like a banshee after just a minute or so on the stir plate. Four hours later, there was no activity! I chilled it once again and then decanted off about 500 ml of nasty starter beer this morning, fed it another 300-400 ml of wort, and again it burst to life, fermenting out in about 2-3 hours! Jeez – this 1388 yeast just chews through the wort. I’m expecting a quick, violent fermentation in my carboy:)
