The Bottle Neck

Why one carboy is not enough

Ha-Haaaaaaah... I forgot that Sunday was my brothers birthday. In a way that delay was not really a problem as there was much weirdness in store for batches 1 and 2.

For a while I’ve understood that I needed another carboy to be able to effectively cycle three batches. The secondary was still occupied by batch 1. In the end, batch 2 only got a secondary for a day because I had no where to put it.

The reason why this traffic jam formed was that batch 2 reached the specified final gravity of 1.016 days earlier than batch #1. WHY? I don’t know. There could be a couple explanations.

Perhaps In transferring batch 1 while it was still coming down from krausen I stunted it a bit. Perhaps there was a major dip in temperature. It did go as low as 15° Celsius at times, but for the most part it was closer to 20° Celsius, but that would effect BOTH batches. It could also be the difference in yeast. Maybe I had not oxygenated it as much as I thought I had... OR, maybe It’s just my dyslexia, coupled with being drunk all the time, and I can’t read a hydrometer... (fucken meniscus)

Basically by the time I got my second carboy to get things moving, batch 2 was at 1.012 when batch 1 was at 1.022, and yet batch 1 was a week older. This was the 7th of February. To make maters worse I MUST have misread the hydrometer because batch 1 showed a gravity of 1.016 on the 6th! WTF??? Batch two also showed a gravity of 1.016 on the 6th, and THAT I can believe.

At that time batch 2 tasted ready, while batch 1 still had some of that raw wort bitter yuck in it. It would be a bitter irony indeed if the cloudy batch tasted better than the clear batch. One has all the taste of proper beer, and the other has all the look.

Oh well. Time will tell.