Racking the Hop Mound

I racked the Hop Mound (Previously known as the Red Riding hop, but got a name change when the beer did not turn out red at all and instead had a huge hop mound inside the fermentor) today yesterday into my secondary fermentor and I lost 1/2 gallon of beer in translation. I am not surprised at this due to the amount of whole leaf hops that were added to the primary fermentor. First judgement of smell is reminiscent of a floral bouquet with a slight bitter scent to it. The beer will be transfered to my cleaned and sanitized keg tomorrow while we are brewing up the recipe that Matt and I put together the other day.

I put the Siebels admission letter in the mail today. So as long as snail mail during the holidays doesn't let me down, I will soon be on my way to beginning the second step in building my beer empire.

HORRAY

Cheers to Beers

Racking the Brewski

So we racked the beer today into a secondary fermentor. I use a plastic five gallon open fermentor. In order to let the trub on the bottom settle back down after movement I started by moving the carboy full of beer into my kitchen two days ago and elevated it onto a counter. I started tonight out by taking my plastic fermentor into the bathtub and filling it up with warm water and 3 cap-fulls of Iodophor. I use one cap-full per 2.5 gallons of water in order to deliver a 12.5 PPM sanitation measure. You are supposed to soak your equipment for two minutes but I did it for a little longer because I wanted to make sure. Inside the fermentor I put my siphoning wand, the airlock, a knife and i let the lid sit upside down with sani in around the o-ring.

When everything is done sanitizing I start the siphon, making sure that the secondary fermentor is lower than the primary, oh physics.

So when all is said and done and the beer has been racked, we took the knife from earlier and cut an organic vanilla bean open and scraped the juice out and stuffed it inside two cinnamon sticks. Cinnamon is a natural antiseptic and there fore does not need to be sanitized, also the inside of the vanilla bean is naturally sanitized....I think. We tossed those into the fermentor and popped the lid on and now we wait

and wait

and wait

The beer sure did smell delicious, it did not have a strong spice smell but did have that delicious pumpkin taste. Also, the FG was 1.01, with a OG of 1.06 this means that the beer will have a ABV of 6.5%

you use the following measurement to figure that out:

(OG (1.06) - FG (1.01) ) x 131 = 6.55%