5,000,000 Dead Irishmen Can’t be Wrong

Brewing is going well.

Today I kegged a dry stout. To me, “dry stout” means something that isn’t a syrupy, overpowering imperial stout or a gross sweetened stout. I guess you could call it an Irish stout. Something that would please a Murphy’s drinker.

It was supposed to attenuate down to a specific gravity of about 1.012, but it got to about 1.016 and slowed down to the point where it barely moved. I am desperate to fill kegs, so I kegged it anyway. Today I stuck it in a new Torpedo Megamouth keg, and I put it on 20 psi of CO2. Tomorrow morning I plan to switch it to beer gas. My hope is that a night on CO2 will get enough CO2 into the beer to allow me to dispense it tomorrow.

Beer gas is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. Nitrogen makes stout silky and a little sweet, but it does not add the carbonation bite CO2 gives, and it leaves beer right after you pour it, so if you don’t have CO2 in your beer, and you dispense it with beer gas, it will go flat sitting in your glass.

In a perfect world, the stout would have been allowed to mature in peace. I would have given it maybe three weeks before kegging it. I just don’t have time. I’d rather have a somewhat imperfect stout than empty kegs. I can make the next one perfect while I drink this one.

I can’t be sure this one will not be excellent. It probably will be. But I am definitely rushing it.

I feel I should order more wheat beer ingredients. Between sampling and wasting beer to get my system working, I am running low. If I have wheat beer, my favorite ale, and stout on tap, I can relax and take time brewing other things.

I have ingredients for a lager and a heavy ale. The lager will take weeks, and the ale will probably be slow as well. I only have faucets for 5 beers, and it may be mid-March before I have the lager and heavy ale ready, so I have to keep reloading the three faster beers unless I want to run out of inventory.

My virus-related taste and smell difficulties are blowing over, but things still are not right. My ale tastes way too bitter. My wheat beer is good, but it should taste better. Another problem: beer seems to hit me way too hard. I had maybe a quart of fairly weak beer today, and I really felt it. Is that because of the virus?

The purpose of brewing is not to get drunk. I hope things go back to normal as this illness winds down.

I suppose coronavirus is also the reason it’s not possible to get every beer-related item I want in a timely manner. It wasn’t until today that I had enough parts to run 3 kegs at once. I still need two fittings in order to get two more kegs going. I expect to need to keg my latest ale in three days, and I ordered the remaining fittings today. They may be here in time. I hope so.

I started ordering dry yeast in bulk. I can pay $11 per batch or $5 per batch. I might as well face reality.

I think my best move right now is to give up on normal lager fermentation and use my pressure fermenter. If the stories are true, I can finish fermentation in under a week with no loss of quality. If I can pull this off, I’ll have an ale and a lager ready to keg in under one week. That leaves me with the heavy ale to work on, and with 4 other beers on tap, I will not be rushed.

After that, I should be able to slow down and act like a normal homebrewer, inventing recipes and making fine adjustments to my equipment.