Saturday, October 31, 2015

Racking


I spent a half hour or so racking and dry-hopping my Citra brew this morning, even had the back door open as it's such a lovely sunny day here today. The process involved siphoning the liquid out of my primary fermenter into a fresh empty one and adding a muslin bag containing a sanitized marble (for weight) and some fresh Citra hops. Hopefully the flavour from the hops will be infused into the beer prior to bottling and the overall effect will enhance the impact that I'm looking for (which is a citrus/grapefruit hit on the nose and palate). The bag will sit in this demijohn for about a week now and then I'll transfer it to bottles for the final stage; I did think to myself as I finally stuffed the hops in; how the heck am I going to get them out again? I guess I'll have to engineer some kind of hooking device on a wire.

As can be seen in the photograph, the beer is quite clear now and smelling gorgeous already, but as you can see from the level I'm not quite hitting the right quantities somewhere along the line, next time I think I need to use a bit more water at the start, about 30% more judging from the empty space!

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