May 202226Thu

Hornindal’s All Gone

Well, that was nice! The hops did start to fade about 10 days after kegging and stayed there in the foreground, bowing out around a week ago – so about 5 weeks after packaging. Somewhere around that time she cleared up very nicely but has been cloudy until then, so I wonder if / how you can brew a hop-forward ale that’s also clear. Probably through excessive finings; bits of plastic, seaweed, and fish guts

The last of the Hornindal Pale – clear, but the hops are gone

On a side note, I’ve had to shut off the gas towards the end of both kegs and gradually reduce the pressure in order to serve anything other than foam, because something’s changed here and it’s turned this brew into a pig to dispense. No doubt this will have expedited the departure of the hops – different conversation – but I even tried to tame the foam by splicing in 4′ of my thinnest beer line, which made the dispense painfully slow but didn’t help with the foam as much as I’d have liked. The only thing I can think of is that I haven’t gotten the pressures right in my transition to beer gas from CO2, and that I may have inadvertently fermented at too high a pressure to begin with. From memory I think I peaked at 15 PSI, so I’m capping Jubilee Clip at a strict 10 in order to see how that affects its behaviour in the keg.