Experiments in General Chemistry

Yesterday Adam and I brewed an American amber ale. The previous time we brewed we had come up short on volume due to boil off (evaporation during the boil) and with too high of a gravity (basically too thick with sugars). We ended up topping off the fermentor with water to 5 gallons which corrected the gravity. The beer came out quite nice in the end. Too avoid this scenario we decided to collect a larger volume of sweet wort while lautering. We were shooting for seven and a half gallons of pre-boil wort as we normally collect seven gallons. We did not take in to account the fact that we would be distracted by the Rangers game on television. We ended up with eight gallons of sweet wort. It was all good though. We hit our target gravity just fine and we have a nice five gallon batch bubbling away in the brew closet.

This is, I'm sure, very exciting to my readership. Or probably not. But the story doesn't end there. We had some extra wort at the end of the boil. I decided to set some of it aside for a small experimental batch. I collected just under a half gallon in a JJ Bittings growler. I didn't have a specific plan for the brew, and actually nearly forgot about it as I was cleaning up after brew day. Plus there was this international friendly on between Argentina and the US which grabbed my attention after cleaning was complete. Eventually I remembered I had the growler chilling in the closet. I tried to come up with a quick plan for the beer. I remembered that we had some dried orange peel left over from a Belgian single we did some time ago. I dropped some of the orange peel into the growler. As I was searching for ingredients to add to the brew I found some Munton's dry yeast. It was over a year past it's best by date, but I said what the hell. I pitched a packet directly into the growler. I was just going to settle with this, but then I started to think about adding spices to ambers. The first brew that came to mind was Anchor's Christmas Ale. It is a seasonal favorite of mine. I headed over to the spice rack and grabbed some nutmeg and coriander. I scooped some of each into the beer and topped it off with an airlock. I probably should have done some research about the amount of spice to add to the beer, but I was kind of in a hurry. I probably over-spiced the hell out of it, but honestly I wasn't sure if the thing would even ferment given that the yeast was a year expired. Though,when I checked it this morning it was bubbling away. I'm excited to see how my little experiment comes out. I'm not sure how I'm going to bottle it, given it is such a small batch. Another experiment for another day.