My first time harvesting. 5 minutes after pouring the yeast cake into my old 1G fermenter. Bottled my Hobgoblin today. First time with it, so dunno if it's even close to what Hobgoblin is supposed to taste like. 28 IBU, so right at my upper limit for bitterness, but since Bitter/Sweet taste buds are right next to each other, I'm thinking some of the sweet malt may be tricking me about how bitter it really is. Conditioning/carbonating will take some of that edge off, perhaps.
This is English Ale yeast. My next recipe calls for Belgian Ale Yeast. I have one smack pack but I'm going to run two batches of Rapier Wit on that one batch. Gotta figure how much of this I'm gonna store until I can get another recipe that calls for English Ale Yeast.
Reading is helping me understand a lot of things. (Imagine that, I can practice what I preach) One thing is the statements I've seen that the liquid smack-packs are barely enough yeast to do the trick. This was VERY evident on this batch of Hobgoblin, and I've noticed it the first time I used liquid in my Rapier Wit. The FG only came down to 1.025 in the Hobgoblin, according to my magic little Hydrometer. That's a lotta malt still in that ale. It started at 1.068, so maybe I can't complain. Sure got a buttload of yeast cake. What's in the 1G Carboy is all the cake from a 5 gallon batch, with about 2 pints of beer left over. I added about another pint of tap water to loosen up the cake some in the bucket by swirling, then shook the crap out of it once I got it transferred to the carboy.
Now, do I pick up some spare DME, make a clean wort, and draw off as much of this sludge as I can and put it in that wort to clean it up, or do I just leave it as is and pick up another English Ale Yeast recipe ASAP. It ain't like I don't have bottles o' plenty. Started out with 60 bottles this morning, washed, rinsed, and then spritzed with fairly concentrated Star-San solution, then turned up to drain. I soak a cloth in a Star-San solution to wipe the necks before capping. Knock on wood, so far, not a single popped cap in 23 batches of beer, and if any was off, I couldn't taste it. Got 52 bottles outta this batch, which is about normal. I always try to bring the total liquid up to about 5.5 Gallons before I cap it off for ferment, which gives me a fairly consistent number of bottles, depending on how fine the trub is and how much I stir it up racking the beer off. Pretty careful with my sanitizing, so can't think of a single sanitation issue I've had yet. The latest, "Leffe Abbey Blonde" may be my nemesis, though. That's been a VERY active beer in the fermenter. STILL bubbling pretty hard after a week in the bucket. It's slowed a lot, but shows no signs of stopping soon.
I've noticed that every time I use a dry yeast (pitch it right outta the pack), I always get well below 1.020, mostly down around 1.010. That lines up with other comments that I've read that the dry packs are typically plenty for a batch. So, perhaps this is a good lesson in pitching. Now let's see what happens when I pitch a slurry. How much of this should I pitch into the next batch of English Ale?