Fermenting Home Brewed Barley Wine

Video Transcript

" Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this next segment, we're going to focus on our fermentation processes. Now that we've got our beer all ready, we're going to start worrying about our fermentation. So, for ales, we're going to want to keep the fermentation temperature between sixty and seventy degrees. You can go on the higher end for some of the higher strength beers like the IPAs, and also for the wheat's which will pull out a little more of the interesting phenolics. For lagers, such as a bock, or a pilsner, we're going to want to go as cold as we can which means we want to hit or aim for fifty degrees. So, with this, you're going to want to take your bucket, put it into a nice, relatively cool dark place in your house and let's start our primary fermentation. In about twenty-four to forty-eight hours, you should start to see your airlock bubble a fair amount. In about three days, your bubbling should be very, very vigorous, maybe even once every second or maybe once every two or three seconds. After that, it's going to start slowing down. Once it hits about one bubble every six seconds, you're going to want to go through your first racking operation which is described in a later segment. Once you've done your first racking operation, the bubbling is going to go down significantly. Okay, at this point, it's going to be going into its second fermentation. All the yeast is going to be falling out of the solution, kind of sedimenting down at the bottom and you're going to have a nice, clean beer. If you did buy a hydrometer, you can track the progress of your fermentation a lot with this. So, you're going to start with your initial hydrometer reading, then in about five or six days, when your primary fermentation is done, you should be down to about thirty percent of what your initial hydrometer reading was. So, if you were starting at ten fifty that would mean you'd be about ten fifteen. At that point, you're going to siphon. And then after that you're going to kind of watch your secondary fermentation. It may drop down a couple more points. It may get down to twenty-five percent of what you started at. If you get to that point, you're in good shape. Even if you didn't, you still may be okay as long as it's not still bubbling. And if you're lower, you're still good. Now when you are brewing a strong beer like this there is a couple of things that may happen during fermentation what we are quiet use to. First of all fermentation may preserve incredibly vigorously with a lot of blow offs so be careful for that in your vassal. Also it is going to take a little longer overall with these strong ales, with the strong lagers. You are going to want to have that initial fermentation you have a lot of sugar to go through so it may take a couple of extra days to go through a primary but once you get into the secondary quiet frankly you want to leave it there as long as you can. As these age the flavors blend together in crates and sometimes even some interesting aging effect appears in this beer so be patient, tuck it away if you can leave it there for a couple of months or even longer that is great. Just make sure to keep the air lock filled and that nothing weird starts growing on the top of it which should not happen especially in alcohol content. "