My first batch/Primary fermenter

After turning off the burners I put the lid on the kettle covering most of the pot except where the connectors for the wort chiller were sticking out. I took the kettle to my patio; connected the garden hose to one side of the wort chiller and a spare hose connected to the other, the end of this hose went to a drainage area off the side of my patio. I turned on the water to my garden hose and the cool water flowed through the hose into the wort chiller and out the other. Putting my hand on the water going into the drainage area I could feel the large increase in temperature, the heat of the wort was being transferred through the copper tubing into the cool water coming from the garden hose.

This process took about 15 to 20 minutes to get the wort down to an acceptable temperature to pitch the yeast, about 75F. This process, while faster than a cool bath method, seemed a little inefficient and water consuming something I would have to pay the utility company for. However this or the cool bath with ice method is what I will have to do until I can come up with a better solution. A fellow brewer and I came up with a rather neat idea for this a couple years later and it is something I will probably share in later installments.

Now that the wort is chilled it is time to transfer it from the kettle to the first fermenter. This is done with a racking cane and tubing .You put the racking cane into the wort holding it off the bottom so you don't transfer any unwanted sludge, in this case spent hop leafs. Then you connect one end of the tubing to the end of the cane and the other end first goes in your mouth to begin the siphon then goes into the fermenter and the wort should flow freely. This is the same process as siphoning gas out of a car. Since I started out with a little more than 5 gallons of water, this being a 5 gallon batch of beer it seemed appropriate, I now have less than 5 gallons of wort due to the loss of water through evaporation during boiling and the sludge content at the bottom of the kettle. This is not a problem water can be added at the end of the process to bring you back up to 5 at the end of the fermentation process, just before bottling.

Save a small portion of the wort to put into a measurement test tube. Then float your hydrometer to measure the original gravity(OG). Measuring the OG is a way to tell how much sugar is in your wort, after fermentation you measure the gravity again and the difference will tell you how much alcohol is in the beer. Sample OG measurement would be something like 1.064, where as a meausrement of 1.000 is pure water. I cannot remember what the reading was of this particular beer seeing how this took place a number of years ago.

Time to pitch the yeast, but first you should give the fermentator full of wort a few good shakes to ensure that the wort is well aerated because yeast needs oxygen. Yeast can come either in liquid or dry form, this particular case I used dry and was able to just dump it in the fermentor and put on the rubber stopper and airlock valve that is filled with water. The valve is pretty simple design basically its a small tube sitting upside down freely on a stem surrounded by a cylinder and the stem protrudes from under the cylinder. How it works is you fill the cylinder about half way up with water so the tube just barely rests on the stem. Now air cannot get through the water and down the stem and into the beer possibly contaminating it and the CO2 given off by the yeast eating the sugar in the wort can go up the stem pushing up the tube and releasing it into the air through the water.

The reason for using the 7gl fermenter as your primary fermenter even though you are only making 5gl of beer is because the majority of the fermentation, if not all, is done in the primary and there is quite a bit of action during fermentation. What happens essentially is yeast eats the sugar and three things happen; the yeast gives off CO2, the yeast also gives off alcohol, and the yeast cell reproduces. So after several hours there a essentially billions of yeast cells eating sugar giving off CO2, alcohol, and reproducing and this process can cause a rather large foam head to appear on top of the wort. Now it sits for a week to 10 days……

At the bottom here is a picture of two primary fermenters in action from a recent 10 gallon batch of beer. Also included is a picture I took of a hydrometer reading after brewing my latest batch.