I decided to test the yeasts. It was a very simple test. I placed the bags of yeast in the oven and let them stay there for a week at 40 – 45 C. After that I checked whether the yeast were still alive.

I was not disappointed. The yeast was not affected at all. It worked perfectly and my mind found peace again.

A few days ago I noticed that I had 2 very old packages of wine yeast. The expiration date is November 2013. Three years ago…. I estimate that the yeast must be 5 or 6 years old. Normally I would throw it away but I was curious. Would the yeast have survived?

So I prepared a very simple starter. It is only apple juice in a clean bottle with the cap placed on top of it. (Not sealed of course) I was actually not surprised that after a few hours the fermentation clearly was underway. Again, I could not see any difference between this old yeast and a new package. I have another package that expired November 2013. Maybe I will test this again in 2020.

The juice is fermenting nicely and I am going to let it finish the job. See if it becomes a nice cider.

So if you have problems with a fermentation I would not blame the yeast. More likely the circumstances in which the yeast are put are too hostile. For example beers with a lot of alcohol may have trouble fermenting after bottling. If this is the case you can try to add champagne yeast which is very alcohol tolerant, give it a better chance with a starter, or in very serious cases you can try to restart the fermentation like this.

Cheers

Hans

I had no idea why it happened because I did everything according to the recipe. So It was time to find out what went wrong. And I found some information that was very helpful. I normally don’t like copying information without testing it but I think that the information I found was pretty good.

First of all I found that there are positive and negative influences on the head. And that the negative influences are much greater than the positive. For example: A perfect beer in a “dirty” glass will always result in disappointing foam.

So what happens when you pour a beer?

First foam forms. I guess that usually this is not a problem When there is CO2, bubbles appear and they drag beer up to form bubbles.

After that the beer drains down between the bubbles and the foam starts to dry.

Then the foam should be strong enough to remain. Some kind of structure should form to keep the bubbles small and strong. If there is something wrong the small bubbles will not be able to sustain themselves and collapse, forming bigger bubbles that will also collapse. It’s like watching your work being destroyed without being able to do anything about it. A dead beer is a sad, sad sight.

So what are the things that attack our beloved heads?

• Higher alcohols. When we talk about alcohol we usually mean ethanol. Ethanol has 2 carbon atoms. Higher alcohols have 3 or more. A strong beer contains more higher alcohols and this has a negative affect on foam.
• Esters. Esters are formed by acids and alcohols. Stronger beers contain more acids and alcohol and therefore again they have more problems with foam.
• The biggest influence are lipids: Fats, oils, wax, sterols. Drinking a beer while eating cheese is killing the beer. The best advice is to clean your glass with hot water and rinse it thoroughly to get rid of soap residues.
• Mashing. Malts of the past needed more steps in mashing. These steps were needed to break down proteine chains. If you do this with “modern” malts the proteine chains are broken down in small chains that cannot sustain foam. So it is advisable to start with a mashing temperature of at least 60 C. In case you use a high percentage of unmalted ingredients you may need to start mashing at a lower temperature.
• Boiling too long causes alpha acids to be removed from hop. These acids are a positive factor in head retention. Boiling longer than 90 minutes should be avoided. For other reasons you should not boil less than 60 minutes.

And what can be done to improve our head?

• Hops. Isomerized alpha acids have a positive effect on foam. So a beer with enough IBU’s has a better chance of a good head.
• Malts. Cara malts contain longer proteins and do not contain enzymes anymore to break them down.
• Racking. Remove the wort from the yeast after the first fermentation stage is finished. Dead yeast may fall apart and enzymes will form that break down the protein that are helpful for the head.
• Fermentation temperature. Yeast is extremely important for your beer in more than 1 aspect so you should do your best to keep them happy. In the case of head retention it is advisable to ferment at temperatures that are not too high. Esters and high alcohols are formed and they are not good for your head. (High alcohols are really not good for YOUR head as well.)
• Shake the bottled beers 2 weeks after bottling. I am not sure if it is a myth or truly helpful but the idea is that shaking the bottles dissolves the CO2 in the neck back in the beer.

I am merely an amateur and do not have the intellectual background to explain all the above. I doubt that there is any person on earth that possesses so much knowledge. I gathered these tips and translated them in “normal people language” because I found them helpful and I hope that it helps to give you a healthy head.

Cheers

Hans

Some time ago I tried to make a pilsner without the proper equipment. I do not have a location to ferment at the proper low temperature and therefore it does not make sense to use a lager yeast. It would produce too many esters which does not fit a pilsner.

So I tried something else. I tried champagne yeast because it ferments very well in wines. The result was a nice beer but obviously not a pilsner.

So this time I decided to use a more normal yeast. In this case Fermentis US 05 because it does not produce a lot of esters and it ferments to a dry beer.

The result is great. The champagne pilsner was a funny experiment but this is much better. It has a nice light hoppy aroma. The bitterness suits the type of beer very well. Not too bitter but definitely there. There are no aroma’s from the yeast or esters. It is very neutral. Since the alcohol level is not too high it is a very drinkable beer. The head is very good and the head retention is better than all my previous beers. I am sure that I will make this beer again.

The drying foam is hanging on to the glass forever

The recipe is exactly the same as the previous experiment. The only difference is the yeast. And it is obvious that the yeast is of great importance.

So here is the recipe:

• Amount 15L
• Efficiency 68%
• IBU 24
• EBC 8
• Starting SG 1047
• End SG Oops. Forgot to measure
• ABV 5,3%?

Ingredients

• 3,5kg Pils malt 3 EBC
• 11 g Brewers gold from Turkey 9,5% for 75 min
• 4 g Aroma from Turkey 8 % just after boiling
• 11 g Fermentis US 05
• 2 g CaCl
• 2 g Citric acid

Mashing

• 62 C for 45 min, 72 C for 15 min, 78 C for 5 min.

Boiling time

• 75 min

Priming sugar

• 8 g/L

Remarks

• No chilling after boiling.
• Fermentation at room temperature

Probably this beer is somewhere in between a blond and pilsner. The bitterness is there, the hop aroma is there but not very outspoken. It is a nice simple very drinkable beer. The head retention is very good. I think that it is the best beer I made so far.

Cheers

Hans

Since I was making wine already I did not need to buy any equipment. The only thing I needed were empty beer bottles. The ones that I have are from Grolsch which have so called “flip top closures” so I don’t even need crown caps.

There are instructions in the package but I don’t need them anymore. Actually my eyes are not able to read the small letters anymore.

This is my personalized manual

• Open the can and place it in hot water. This way the syrup becomes more fluent.
• Start boiling water. This is not strictly necessary but apparently boiling the water results in better foam on your beer.
• Sterilize the fermenter and put in the syrup.
• Rinse the can with hot water to get all the syrup out. Watch out, the can gets hot.
• Add the sugar in the can and dissolve it in boiling water before adding it to the fermenter.
• Sterilize a spoon (And your hands).
• Add the proper amount of boiling water and stir. When a kit is meant for 9 liter I fill the fermenter up to maximum 9,5 liter. (During racking you will lose some beer.)
• Close the fermenter and wait until the wort has cooled to room temperature.
• Add the yeast. After a few hours you will see that the yeast starts working. Keep the fermenter in a room where the temperature does not fluctuate too much. Yeast doesn’t like that.
• One day later you will see why you need a big fermenter. Lots of foam!

This is the nice thing of a demijohn. You can see what happens! This was an abbey kit with wyeast abbey yeast. I discovered later that the yeast was too expensive to use for one kit but look at that foam!

• When the fermentation slows down I transfer the beer to a demijohn. This is not really necessary but I need the fermenter more often and it looks nicer in a demijohn.
• After 2 weeks the fermentation is usually finished. You can check it with a hydrometer but I don’t do that anymore. When in doubt just wait a week longer.
• Then it is bottling time.
• Rinse the bottles with a sulphite and citric acid solution.
• Put the bottling sugar in another demijohn and rack the beer in it. Do not disturb the lees. Make sure that the sugar is dissolved before bottling!
• Rack the beer in the bottles with the bottle filler.
• Store the beer in a room with constant room temperature and wait 6 to 8 weeks. Some beers will improve when you age them longer.

At the moment I do not make the kits anymore. Nowadays I am brewing beer the hard way. But at the time I was already thinking about some experiments with the kits. For example; using another yeast, adding some hops, substituting part of the sugar for honey, using another kind of sugar, add some extra sugar for more alcohol, etc. etc.. There are many things that you can do to create “your own beer” with a kit as a start point.

Cheers!

Hans

As I said before; I share my mistakes so you don’t have to make them again.

Putting beer (Or champagne) in bottles.

The last step in making beer is putting it in bottles. It is my least favourite step because it looks a lot like working.

You can do this as follows:

• Dissolve bottling sugar in water and add the right amount of the solution to each bottle and add the beer.
• Add the right amount of sugar to each bottle and add the beer.
• Add all the bottling sugar to another demijohn or bucket and rack the beer to that bucket. Then put it the beer in bottles.

The last option is my favourite because you don’t need to be very precise. Instead of measuring 2,64 gm per 0,33L bottle you can measure 120 gm per 15L. I also believe that is less work. I am not 100% sure of the last part because it requires one last racking extra.

So what I do is the following:

• I clean a demijohn and add the bottling sugar. Usually about 8 g/L for beer (or 20 to 25 g/L for champagne.)
• Rack the beer into this demijohn. Don’t worry too much about splashing and oxygen because you need oxygen to give life to your yeast again. Also don’t worry about racking some yeast. Your beer needs it. Try to get as much beer in this demijohn as possible. There is no need to to work extremely clean because new yeast will form in the bottles anyway.
• Shake the demijohn until you are sure that all the sugar is dissolved in the beer. (For champagne this takes a bit longer because there is a lot more sugar to dissolve.)
• Siphon the beer from the demijohn in the beer bottles. Get this tool if you don’t have it. It is worth its’ weight in gold!

So here comes the DOOOHH!! part. I made 2 huge mistakes in these simple steps.

• I forgot to add the bottling sugar completely. I just racked the beer in another empty demijohn and into the beer bottles. After 1 month I found that there was no CO2 at all in the finished beer.
• I added the bottling sugar to the demijohn but did not dissolve it properly in the beer. The result was that some bottles had very little CO2 in them but other bottles had very much and they created so much CO2 that you could barely taste the beer.

Learning all the time.

Cheers

Hans

My first thought went to using wine yeast. Wine yeast usually don’t create a lot of esters and ferment until the last grain of sugar is eaten. Unfortunately wine yeasts don’t flocculate as well as beer yeasts. Champagne yeast is the best among the wine yeasts in that aspect. It also is a very strong yeast that can tolerate high levels of alcohol.

However after some research I found that wine yeasts cannot handle the more complicated sugars in beer. Of course the internet is not a great help because I also found some sites that claim that wine champagne yeast can ferment beer to dryness. Great, all this “information”. What can you do?

I decided to try it. So I made a simple recipe for pilsner which I fermented with champagne yeast. I made some changes to improve my chances for success and suitable for my situation:

• I used mash temperatures which started a bit lower so I would get more “simple” sugars.
• Since I don’t have a refrigerator the fermentation was at room temperature.
• I stopped chilling wort some time ago and did not see a reason to do this.
• Since I like the Turkish hops I used them instead of the hops mentioned in the recipe.

The fermentation started like crazy and after 2 days it looked as if it was finished already. I always leave the demijohn in peace for at least 2 weeks and then I measured the gravity. The hydrometer stopped at 1020.

This was not great news. When you look at the table you can see that the residual sugar is 50 g/L. This is obviously very much and it means that only 3,5% alcohol had formed. After bottling this would total to approximately 3,9%.

I decided to continue and see what would happen. After a few weeks I tried the beer and it was very nice. It was not pilsner but much more like wheat beer. An aroma of bananas and a good body. Since the higher sugars don’t taste sweet it actually feels reasonably dry and fresh. The colour is rather light and it is cloudy. Probably because the champagne yeast cannot compete with beer yeasts in terms of flocculation. In a strange way you don’t have the feeling that there is only little alcohol in it. Perhaps the higher sugars also give an alcohol sensation. I should look into that.

Anyway, the recipe is as follows:

Goal (Or I should say: Unexpected result)

• Amount 15L
• Efficiency 68%
• IBU 24
• EBC 8
• Starting SG 1047
• End SG 1020
• ABV 3,5%

Ingredients

• 3,5kg Pils malt 3 EBC
• 11 g Brewers gold from Turkey 9,5% for 75 min
• 4 g Aroma from Turkey 8 % just after boiling
• 11 g champagne yeast
• 2 g CaCl
• 2 g Citric acid

Mashing

• 62 C for 45 min, 72 C for 15 min, 78 C for 5 min.

Boiling time

• 75 min

Remarks

• No chilling after boiling.

With all the modifications it is not a surprise that the beer did not turn out to be pilsner but some lessons were learned.

Champagne yeast can definitely be used in beer making. It does not create a lot of alcohol but still gives you a full bodied beer. I believe that it would be very suitable for a wheat beer.

Champagne yeast does not ferment all the sugars in beer. If you want a low alcohol beer because your friends cannot handle it, please start your own experiment.

Since this experiment is very drinkable I will start a new experiment very soon. That is what I love about making beer. It may not be what you aim for; It can still be very good!

Cheers

Hans

And see what happens next! When the fermentation finally started I was still a little worried because it remained a little slow. For that reason I decided to put it in the 15 liter demijohn and fill it up. Champagne yeast usually does not create a lot of foam so I did not expect problems.

Only a few hours later the weather changed dramatically. From a relaxed sunny day it turned into a hurricane. Fermentation became quite violent and I was afraid that the air lock would be filled with foam and eventually overflow and spill on the table.

A simple solution is to accept the fact that it overflows and place the demijohn in the shower so you can clean it easily. Perhaps your family will not think that this is a brilliant solution.

And they are right. A nicer solution is the Tsunami airlock. It obviously is not a high tech solution but it works good enough. And it is very easy to make.

• Make two holes in the cap of a bottle.
• Glue a tube in one of the holes. (The tube should fit in the hole for the air lock in the cap or bung.)
• The end of the tube should be close to the bottom of the bottle.
• Add water to the bottle so that the tube is in the water. (For security you can add some citric acid and sulphite to the water.)
• Connect the tube to the demijohn.

Obviously it does not stop the foaming but the foam is collected in the bottle.

Please note that in extreme cases the bottle will be filled, so you still need to check it.

Cheers

Hans

I also made apple wine from fresh apples that I got from a friend. Since it is a bit hard to get the juice out of the apples without a tool like this I didn’t make it often.

This year I was happy to make it. With my improved juicer it was fun to get the juice. Since it was not enough I also bought 4 kg apples from the supermarket.

I made a measurement of the sugar and added some to reach about 11% alcohol. I knew that the apples from my friend are very acidic and therefore I decided not to make a measurement at all. I don’t like to use chemicals to get some acid out of the wine. If it would prove to be too sour I could add some sugar just before drinking or I could blend it with a wine that is not sour. We will decide later.

So I put the apple juice and the sugar in a bucket, rehydrated the yeast and also added it. To my big surprise the fermentation sort of started, but stopped very quickly. This has never happened to me before!

There it is again; The question that I asked myself many times “What happened?”

I have no doubt about the yeast, and the apples from my friend. I have used them before and I know that yeast absolutely love apples. The only new thing were the supermarket apples. It did not take a long time before I realized that these apples are treated with some kind of poison to protect them from bugs.

So that is it! The yeast was poisoned! I could not believe that there was still enough poison in these apples to stop the fermentation. As a child we were always told “Snack healthy, eat an apple.” (Poorly translated from Dutch) I seriously have my doubts about how healthy apples really are.

Since I had 15 liters of juice I did not want to give up immediately. I decided to make a very big yeast starter to see if I could get the fermentation going. So I bought a big bottle of apple juice and made a starter. Now I had a big, big army of yeast on my side. So I added 1,5 liter very active starter to the bucket. It started to ferment but I was not happy with it. Fermentation became slow and eventually stopped again. I could not believe it. How much poison is in these apples?

So I decided to follow the advice given in some books. The procedure is as follows:

• Make a starter with apple juice or whatever you usually use.
• When the starter is very active add the same amount of the “not fermenting juice” to it.
• When the starter is very active again, add again the same amount of juice. (Double as in the previous step.)
• Repeat this until all the juice is fermenting.

Since I never tried it before I was not so sure it would work. The juice already killed an enormous amount of yeast before so why should it not kill again?

But I still wanted to try. Otherwise I had to throw away a lot of work. So I bought another bottle of apple juice and made another starter. This time I used champagne yeast. I know that it is recommended for restarting fermentations also in beers.

I followed the procedure but in the beginning I added less “poisoned juice” just to let the yeast get used to it. (Again I pretend that yeast act like humans.) The fermentation was still slow and I did not believe it would work. I thought that the yeast would be killed again when I would add more and more of the poisoned juice.

Fermenting most                          Poisoned apple juice

But I slowly increased the amount of juice and also shook the bucket several times to get air mixed in. Oxygen is important for yeast growth and they could use all the help I can give.

And to my surprise the fermentation became faster. More and more bubbles through the air lock.

Now all the juice is in the bucket and fermentation continues. No bad smells. Things are looking good.

I celebrate the victory of my champagne army!

Cheers

Hans

P.S.

Why the fermentation of these apples was so troublesome I don’t know. Saying that apples are poison without proper knowledge may be considered a little dramatic.

Chilling is such a hassle!

So the first impression was not a good one. After that I paid more attention and managed to use my tools in a proper way.

But still I had my doubts. One of the main reasons for chilling that is mentioned everywhere is to avoid infection with bacteria. This does not make sense to me at all. What could happen when I put the boiling wort directly in a container, close it, and let it cool down? The container would be sterilized by the heat. As a matter of fact; I believe that the chilling process can actually introduce infections. Just think about it: All the time that you are chilling, the wort is accessible by the outside world! And at a very likeable temperature as well!

The second argument mentioned in my books is maillard products. Nothing is really wrong with them, the only thing is that they produce colour. Well I don’t really mind if my beer is a bit darker than it should be. I am an amateur.

As you can see from the picture, but this is a non chilled white beer. Looks fine to me.

So, from my books I see no real downsides. Let’s check the internet!

Maybe not….. As usual you can find many people who have no problem at all and just as many who believe that it is impossible and that you will get incurable diseases if you dare to try it. I wish that somebody could invent a “Bullshit filter” for Google.

This site may be the one that I would recommend but that is only because it agrees with me. Let that be clear; I do not claim to have possession of the truth (If there is one.) I am just trying.

And that is what I have done. After thinking about the consequences I decided that there may be another issue: Hops! What would happen if they remain in hot wort for a longer time?

For the bittering hops I don’t see a problem. What would happen to them after 90 minutes boiling?

Aroma hops is probably a different story. When they are chilled the effect on the bitterness is limited but when they are not chilled they would add all their bitterness to the wort. I guess that that problem is solved when you remove them after boiling. However, there is a second problem. What about the aroma? Probably this will disappear. So aroma hops are a bit useless if you don’t change something. They don’t add bitterness and the aroma is also gone.

What I have done so far is replacing the last hop gift for a dry hop gift. Another option could be to boil the aroma hops separately the next day in a little water for 5 minutes (or what your recipe says) and then mix it with the cooled wort so it cools down instantly.

You can talk the talk, but have you walked the walk?

As you may have guessed I am not so fond of the internet. It is almost impossible to determine which information is useful or if somebody’s nephew heard it from somebody’s sisters friends brother etc..

In this case I can say that I have made 5 different beers without chilling them and I have not had a problem yet. At this moment I only see positive points:

• You don’t need cooling equipment
• You save time
• You save a lot of cold water
• You decrease the risk of infection

I realize that making 5 different beers is not a lot but for me it is enough to say that I will not chill anymore.

Cheers

Hans

I was very happy with it but also a bit ashamed of this snobbish piece of equipment which nobody really needs. You don’t get the combination of these feelings very often.

Shortly after buying it I realized that it is a great place to let cheeses ripen. Only at that moment I started making cheese. The refrigerator was suddenly a tool that I could not miss.

A few months ago I noticed that there was something wrong. It became more noisy and the motor would not stop running. The motor was also very hot. It even had big problems to keep the temperature at 18C.

I googled to see if I could find out what the problem could be. The motor was running, the thermostat was working… Many more options are not available and based on my research I concluded that the coolant had leaked out of the system.

On some Dutch “do it yourself” sites I saw the advice “Throw it away and buy a new one!” because the repair would be too expensive.

I was pretty angry about it because it is only 4 years old! It is an AEG so I expect German quality. Unfortunately the German quality was “made in China”.

The first thing I tried was kicking it very hard but that did not help. I googled some more and I found some movies that showed that it is not so difficult to refill a refrigerator. Nobody mentioned anything about fixing the leak but after some more googling I read somewhere that the leak could be extremely small.

I decided to have a look for the equipment and try to fix it. I found a site with a copper filler tube which you have to solder to the refrigerator, a gas bottle and a tap for the bottle. That looked promising so I ordered them. I decided that I could find a tube needed to connect the filler tube to the tap in a hardware shop.

That was a mistake. The thread of the copper filler tube mentioned ¼” but it definitely was not the G¼” that is available. It turned out to be SAE which is not used regularly. But luckily I found a website that sells a tube with this thread. By now I spent 100 euro without any guarantee.

Now was the moment of truth. I cut the filler line and soldered the filler tube in it. This went surprisingly easy considering I have not soldered before.

On the refrigerator is mentioned that I should get 25 gram of the gas R600a in it.

I connected the can, the tap, and the tube to the filler and opened the tap. I could hear the gas flowing but it was not much. I weighed the can and it was only about 12 gram lighter.

Then I remembered that the motor should be running!

I connected it again and switched on the refrigerator. This time I could hear that the motor sucked in more gas.

I disconnected everything and closed the filler with its cap.

This time approximately 30 gram went in. I did not have any patience so I let the refrigerator running. It worked great! The outside became warm and the temperature in the refrigerator dropped really quick.

It is working for 2 months now and I am sure that it is working better than when it was new. It is cooling faster and it is not as noisy. And the funny thing is that the filler is still there! I have enough gas for 10 more refills so if it happens again I can simply fill it again.

You can believe that I am really happy with the result. I can make cheese again.

Hans

Read the update