Day 55: Beer Check-up

2/4/12

It’s been a full week since I started my batch of beer. Today was clean carboy day. It’s good to finally have a use for the 6-gallon glass carboys I purchased at a hometown church rummage sale. I picked them up in 2005, after buying a house with 2 beautiful apple trees. The plan was hard apple cider. But like most plans of my past, the military got in the way. I relocated and sold the house before the first apple fall. But I held on the jugs, knowing one day I’d fill them.

I planted 15 fruit trees after purchasing this property in 2008, but fruit trees are slow growing. The deer successfully wiped out a quarter of the orchard in the first year. I’ve picked a handful of cherries, a couple peaches, five lovely red pears, and about a dozen apples. My trees have a long way to go before I’m making cider or wine. In the meantime, I’ll make beer.

I transferred the fermenting beer from the original jug to a clean jug. The idea was to siphon off the beer from the sediment collecting on the bottom of the jug. This extra step is supposed to create a cleaner, smoother beer.

The amount of sludge left over after removing the clean beer surprised me. There was more than a quart. I siphoned a little clean beer into a glass just to check the progress. It’s too early to tell, but so far so good. I can tell you one thing for sure; my hens really enjoyed the gift of scratch corn soaked in beer sediment. Happy, happy birds.