goodnight william
Well there it is, done for the year. William’s Winter Warmer has been “put to bed” in FV1, one of our 14 barrel vessels, yeast has been pitched and the wort vigorously roused to aerate it as much as possible. Aeration is very important at this early stage, especially for a relatively high gravity beer such as this, to promote good yeast cell division and get fermentation off to a rapid start. If we were to under aerate for example we may experience an extended lag phase and we’ll be in for a correspondingly lengthy fermentation which may require re-pitching of active yeast. Ensuring that we have a viable yeast pitched into a well aerated wort at optimal temperature (70F in this case) will get us off to a good start and avoid problems further down the line. It is for this reason that we collected our 7 barrels of wort in a 14 bbl FV, it is physically easier to rouse (and hence aerate) the wort. The large head space in the open fermenting vessel also helps avoid loss of yeast from the vessel as the yeast head rises during exponential growth or due to rapid release of dissolved CO2 from the fermenting wort which sometimes happens as the night time ambient temperature falls and the wort is then roused the following morning. I collected the wort at an original gravity of 1.080 and will be aiming to attenuate to about 1.016 before crash cooling giving a final a.b.v. of a little over 8%. I will fill a number of firkins with William’s Winter Warmer, at least 2 of which will be aged on Oak for release in January.
Cheers
Steve
Tags: Cask Ale, firkin, Oak Aged, William's Winter Warmer