Geronimo

Ref 2023-03 Geronimo Brewer Pain & Patience
Style New England IPA Type Beer, all-grain
Started Thu 9th Mar 23 OG 1.064 Status In Progress
Packaged Fermenter Fermzilla 5 PSI
Handle 2023-03 Geronimo
Brewer Pain & Patience
Style New England IPA
Type Beer, all-grain
Fermenter Fermzilla
Status In Progress
Started Thu 9th Mar 23 OG 1.064

Another go at this one, increasing the malt bill as well as the hops in order to raise the ABV. Tracking in Brewfather.

Milestones & Tasks

Mar 21 -9dTo-do: kegging
Mar 13 -17dDry-hopped
Mar 09 -21dStarted Primary
8 days
Mar 202313Mon

Fermentation appears to have slowed to nothing and most of the Krausen has cleared, so I’d like to throw the finishing hops in now and have the last remnants of fermentation clean up the introduced O2. In an unexpected development I seem to have lost pressure from the FV, with the gauge on the spunding valve indicating 0 PSI at one point. Tightening up both top disconnects resulted in the needle budging a little, but she really seems to be done now. Hopefully we’ll get another burst now that the hops are inane that will act as insurance against suck-in during cold-crashing.

4 days
Mar 202309Thu

Quite a good brew day today. Only one small error (heaters on Auto rather than Auto Mash, no scorching though) and I’m very very close to all my numbers, both in terms of volumes and gravity. The only exception there is the amount of trub loss when using the Trubinator, and going forward I may think about creating a dedicated equipment profile for when I’m using this piece of kit. Unfortunately doing so would effectively fork any subsequent tweaks as I’ll be tuning two profiles, so we’ll have to think about this some more.

Under-Pitched Voss

One thing which did give me slight concern today was my desperate under-pitching of Voss Kveik. If memory serves correctly I used half a sachet of slurry on a previous incarnation of Geronimo and then a quarter on Jackknife Barber, leaving me with one quarter sachet and the hope that my previous doses hadn’t been too greedy.

I warmed the alarmingly light bag during boil using my laptop, weighed it at 51.93g, and pitched it at around 24℃ with the empty bag weighing 10.71g – so 41.22g of yeast for 21 litres of 1.064. Nothing happened in the following hors and continued to happen when I turned in for the night, but at around 05:00 the next day it took off in typical Kveik fashion. The following morning I was relieved to see I’d remembered to fit the spunding valve, but disappointed to find I’d adjusted it too high, because it was hissing merrily at around 17 PSI. Voss is one hard, mad bastard. Reduced pressure gradually to 5 PSI as I don’t want to suppress too many Esthers or release too much hoppy goodness via CO2 when it’s time to dry-hop. All good for now.

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