General Brew Update: Boxshed Autumn Ale and Boxshed Dark Garden ’09
7 October, 2009 by fivetide2009
Just a quick update of various movements of beers between different buckets, kegs and bottles. It may not look much but then you didn’t have to clean the stone out of the bottles and kegs with a pipe brush and a hosepipe…
The Boxshed Top Secret Autumn Ale finished secondary fermentation, dropping nice and clear. We put 25L into a primed King Keg, which was kept in the warm to build up some pressure and to allow venting of oxygen before being transferred to my bruv’s house down country lanes in the passenger seat of an ageing hatchback. A further 19L filled a cornie for the Boxshed, while several bottles were primed and filled as testers and treats. All are now in cold conditioning, in one shed or another!
The Boxshed Dark Garden ’09 finished primary fermentation and has been siphoned into clean FVs for 5-7 days of secondary in readiness for racking off to a similar selection of kegs and bottles to the Autumn Ale, which has by the way now been given a (hopefully) beguilingly dull name.
*Hopefully there will be news of another brewday later in the week – watch this space*
A few grainy pictures of various transfers:
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Muntons’ Dark Spray Malt seemed a good option for priming an Autumnal brew
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Boiled up 80g or so in 150ml water, reheated and poured into keg. CAMRA would approve…
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Siphoning 25L clear(ish) secondary fermented beer under priming solution
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Siphoning 19L under CO2 blanket into a cornie for later forced carbonisation. CAMRA would shake its bearded head…
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This pub gas has lasted more than two years, and is mainly used for dispensing
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Enough left to fill around half a crate of swingtops as testers and snifters
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L@@k! Top Secret Autumn Ale is now officially ‘Boxshed Brown Corduroys’. Thanks bruv…
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Milds make an awful mess of primary fermenters, and Boxshed Dark Garden ’09 is no exception
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Got all the good stuff out and left the gunky stuff in. No harvesting this time
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One down, one to go, moving all 50L to secondary FVs
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Here it is, clearing nicely, still as a millpond, and smelly nice and chewy
Posted in Update | Tagged autumn, autumn ale, bottling, Boxshed Brown Corduroys, Boxshed Dark garden, Boxshed dark Garden '09, Boxshed Top Secret Autumn Ale, Cornelius keg, cornie, Fermentation, FV, garden hops, kegs, King Keg, primary, racking, secondary, siphon, swintops, transfer | 3 Comments
Hi There
I’ve recently primed & filled a King Keg. How do you vent it of oxygen? I guess this is to stop the beer going stale with prolonged storage?
Ta!
Well the quick way is to seal up the lid tight with vaseline on the threads, then shoot some CO2 in the valve via caplets or Widget World or pub gas – whatever you have. Leave for a minute then squeeze the brown pressure release rubber washer to vent off all the gas. Repeat. You can also vent off the natural gas build up to ensure there’s no oxygen in there when it splashes around, just before you plan to transport it (like I did). It’s a shame to lose that pressure, but for me is better than risking oxidation.
Thanks for that! I now have one vented keg.