I cheated

posted by Jon

This will be the first of a few catch-up posts, as I haven't had time to post about all of the recent goings-on at KSB.

We ran into a problem with the Intruder. The Intruder starts out with an original gravity around 1.082. It should finish around 1.020, giving it about 8% ABV. On November 29 I racked it off to the secondary and added the vanilla and oak chips. When I did this is was at about 1.032. After a couple of weeks I checked the gravity and it hadn't budged. It was right around 1.030. I tried adding dry champagne yeast. Champagne yeast is a yeast that can work at higher percentages of alcohol. I checked again a couple of weeks later and it still hadn't moved. If the beer is bottled as is, it will be lower alcohol and much sweeter than it is supposed to be. I brought out the big guns. That's right, the Von Bora. On December 22, I siphoned off a bit of the sludge and yeast in suspension from the bottom of the fermenter that held the Von Bora into the Intruder. The thought is that it would finish off the Intruder and it shouldn't really affect the taste. Within a few days the airlock was bubbling every 20 seconds of so. A week later it was bubbling even faster, every 10 seconds. It is starting to peter out now. I should be able to cold crash the Intruder and have it ready for bottling in a week or so.

The bad news is that if this is the best beer we've ever brewed it might be difficult to replicate it.