It’s not terribly important just starting out but, once you start really figuring out what you’re doing, you’ll probably want to calibrate your hydrometer. Go to the grocery store and get some distilled water. Your hydrometer should read that as 1.000. If it’s off, you’ll know what you’ll need to add/subtract to correct any other readings you take. Also, don’t forget to use the temperature correction table that should have come with your hydrometer.
If I’m using the “shake the holy crap out of it” method I like to do that after I pitch the yeast. Get’s everything nice and stirred up. Probably doesn’t really matter one way or the other though.
I don’t think it matters, before or after. Maybe even both. With dry though, if you sprinkle it on top you might want to do it before so you don’t leave yeast clinging to the top/sides of the fermenter.
Also, yes, calibrate your hydrometer. I don’t think you have to use distilled, use whatever water you use to brew, it’ll be fine. If it doesn’t read zero, just figure out how high/low it reads and adjust all of your measurements by that much.
And, yes, get the beer cooler while it’s fermenting. This is really important if you want it to taste good. Controlling your temps is huge. The water bath / frozen bottle method described above is an inexpensive and very effective way of doing it. Warmer ferments faster, but speed is not your goal.
Let us know how it goes.
So, you tasted it and had face-to-face feedback with the brewer. What feedback did you give him?
My guess, based on the information provided so far, is that the brewer might just have a calibration problem with his hydrometer. Sometimes if you get too much trub, or whatever, in the sample, the hydrometer can read high, even though the beer has fermented out.
The recipe looks sound. 7 days in primary (assuming no other problems with yeast or fermentation temp.) is about right for an ale. Techniques described so far sound OK. The top-ranked BJCP judge thought it was good. Other than instrument error, all I can think of is yeast management problems, but a 1.027 F.G. would be incredibly underattenuated; hardly “mmmm”-worthy, unless Gordon has a huge sweet-tooth that we don’t know about.
Two different people. mswilliams1975 had the beer that finished at 1.027. timberati brought the beer to Gordon.
Nice, Denny! Doing something special for 400?
Something big and Belgian.
Nice! I’d love to trade Belgian recipes with you, Denny!
OK so based on the feed back from everyone I pitched 2 packs of the Safale US 05 yeast and I built a cooler. So my OG was 1.050 and am fermenting at 60-63 degrees. So to all of you thank you for the help. I will let you know how this turns out in a few weeks.
Now I would have posted the pics but apparently I can not figure that out so here are the links instead.
You just have to grab the URL of the photo (from the download link) and enclose it in IMG tags:
Pretty sweet looking fermentation chamber.
Great photo! Looks like the core to an antimatter reactor!
Thanks guys.