All grain cherry poppin'

For my first jab at my new all-grain brew kit I called up Mo'Problemas and we got to brewing the Zhykuta pale ale that came with my kit. I figured it was going to be a lot more work (it was), it would be more fun having someone else to screw up with (it was), but most importantly, if Mo'Problemas had contributed to the resulting disaster, he would feel a little more obligated to drink it with me, instead of me having to down 15 liters of bad beer all on my lonesome.

Being as I am more familiar with the process to brew using hopped malt extract, I made myself a little check-list with all the different steps of the process in an attempt not to miss or screw up anything. Of course, it didn't matter. We still found a way to forget to sanitize some things, having to take a break from the task at hand to fix that. This nevertheless probably won't have too many consequences aside from having used way too much sanitizer and needing to buy more for our next brew.

Our biggest fault however was that we didn't take the time to figure out if we had the right connector to hook up the cooling coil to the faucet. Dropping the temperature fast once the boil is done is important not to loose taste and smell in the final product, as well as to prevent contamination. The more hops are boiled, the more the particles responsible for their smell and taste evaporate, leaving only the bittering effects. Furthermore, taking to long in reducing the temperature can cause the existence of Dimethyl Sulfate (or DMS), giving your beer the taste of boiled vegetables (yumm).

This is where we failed miserably.

After a few minutes of holding the faucet and the cooling coil together with our hands with very little result (obviously) other than rinsing half the kitchen off (less cleaning to do!), we decided to stick everything in the shower and turn on the cold water. For those who haven't had the chance to try out this method of cooling down the wort themselves, an invaluable heads-up: it doesn't work too well at all. To give you an idea, an hour under the shower will bring down the temperature by about 15ºC, when the ideal target is to bring it down to 20ºC in about 20 minutes.

Such an epic fail would no doubt have been fatal for a bland English pale ale recipe. It's a good thing however that we had tweaked the recipe to try to give the beer a little more taste. Instead of adding 27 gr. of hops after 75 minutes of boil for the taste and 70 gr. on 90 minutes for the aroma, we added 77 gr. after 75 minutes for the taste and only 20 for the aroma. To compensate the loss of aroma that would cause, a week later we dry hopped the already fermenting beer with 15 gr. of Citra.

The original intention was to push our English pale ale closer to an American one, giving it a hoppier taste and smell. After the cooling fiasco, salvaging a little more of the taste than we would've had we not tweaked the recipe would already be a huge triumph.

I guess we'll just come up with something else if the beer is bland or tastes like boiled veggies. We do have to drink it after all.