Wow! Wyeast 1388 is a Workhorse!

Mark Ranes — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:52:17 +0000

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!

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

Strong Golden Showers…

Mark Ranes — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:11:04 +0000

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:)

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed: