My Kolsch yeast scares me

So last night I was racking over my Kolsch from the secondary into a keg and I was harvesting the traub to use for an alt in the future. It was just then it happened, I turned my head and my yeast bit me! The goddamn stuff jumped out of the bottle and bit my finger!

I immediately proceeded to shake the beast free from my finger and it took off towards the sum pump. This yeast knew it was strong enough to brave the cold upstate winter and it wanted the freedom of the outdoors. Fearing for my own life and the life of my assistant brewer Meatball, I went after the beast. It was an ugly scene, traub, hops and blood were everywhere, but at the end of the day, I had bagged me a ferocious yeast stain.

Seriously though, that kolsch yeast is a REALLY aggressive yeast. It's pretty unexpected because it's associated with lighter beers, but it flocculates right through the wort like it's nobodies business.

Last night I did some racking. When I went to rack my kolsch over to a keg from a secondary that has been in the fridge for the last 8 days, the yeast was STILL bubbling in the bottle I used for yeast storage.



As you can see from the pictures above, the one on the lest is the kolsch as I am racking it over last night. The one on the right is the cream ale that used the same yeast and is in the fridge now. If you notice the bubbler with the red cap on the left, that's the one where the yeast from the kolsch is and it's already bubbled over since last night!

Anyway, just a word of warning on this dangerous beast, err I mean yeast.

On the kolsch itself it's a very light beer. I actually topped it off with water after the primary which may have lightened it more, but it tastes fine. It's going to need a little time though. There is a definite lager taste to the kolsch yeast which makes it really intriguing. I did some reading last night in Ray Daniels book, Designing Great Beers, and he traces the origin of the kolsch to a time when Germany went crazy for lagers and ales needed to take the edge off in order to preserve the classic ale styles of old. Interesting stuff and a GREAT book if you want to tell your kids or wife something to get you, this is a great choice.

When I kegged the kolsh, I racked over the cream ale into the secondary.

It was pretty light as well. It has a really nice flavor to it, I think I might bring this to x-mas with my in-laws because it's a great gateway beer for people who are into American Pilsners.



In the end, the whole experience was nothing a few band-aids and a beer couldn't fix.

Cheers!

Big brewing weekend

Okay, so this is not going to be a very good post for me explaining all of the ins and outs of our brew day. Instead, this is going to be more of a summary of the vitals and a quick note on the mash tun going on the fritz (for the second weekend in a row!).

So here we go.

We did two batches this weekend, a 10 gallon Kolsch and a 6 gallon Imperial Stout that was a knock off of a Great Divide Yeti clone. First off, the tale of the tape:

Kolsch - 10 gallons

16.75lb Pilsner
2.75lb Wheat Malt
1.75lb Vienna
.25lb flaked barley

Target OG was 1.045
Actual OG was 1.050

Yeast: 1000ml starter Kolsch Yeast (#2565)

Pre-boil gravity was 1.036

The Kolsh went really well, we hit our targets dead on and actually managed better than the efficiency I had made the recipe out for (normal was 59% and with the OG I think it was 68%). Since we did the two recipes in a single brew day, it was a lot of running around and a lot of on the fly scheduling of what to do when. We struck the Yeti clone with about 15min remaining on the mash of the kolsch.

Great Divide Yeti Clone - 6 gallons

16.25lb US Pale Malt
2lb Crystal 120L
1.75lb Black Patent
1.75lb Chocolate
1.60lb Roasted Barley
1.50lb Flaked Rye

Target OG was 1.088
Actual OG was 1.071

Yeast: 1/2 gallon starter of ESB and American Ale mix (there was a little Kolsh in the mix too)

Pre-boil gravity was ~1.050

Now things went a little crazy during the Yeti. The way that we worked this out was while the Kolsch was in the mash tun being sparged, we had the Yeti split up into two different coolers struck in water at 158f. The plan was to, when the kolsch was done sparging, dump the two coolers into the mashtun for mashout and sparge.

Everything went according to plan until we got the yeti grain into the mash tun. Once there, the mashtun developed a clog and would not drain any of the wort. So we did things the old fashioned way. We used a strainer and a jug to run through all the grains. We washed the grains once and were on our way (really it was a CRAZY mess that made brewing look like a monkey fucking a football, but I digress).

As you can see from the pictures below, we have a few boil overs, but we had two new brewers over so it's worth it showing them the full Monty.



How are things now?

Well as you can see from my crappy first video on CNYBrew.com, both the Yeti (on the right) and the kolsh are plugging away.

Special thanks to Taylor and Cooter for coming and allowing us to have a belated "teach a friend to brewday".

More to come this week including a post on the hops shortage.

Cheers!

**one quick note, we treated the stout with 2tbs of gypsum and 1/2tbs of baking soda. Now the bad news is that we were not able to observe any of the potential efficiency benefits because our cluster-fuck of a brewing pretty much threw efficiency out the window. The good news is that we were homebrewing, not preforming brain surgery so it's all going to be OK.