Good morning!
It's been 7 days since I started the last brew and about 4-5 days since it started talking.
Fermentation slowed down and I took a gravity reading yesterday; the starting gravity was 1038-1040 and by yesterday we reached 1008 which is a good rate of conversion of sugar to alcohol. This morning I opened it up again to have a second reading and confirm that fermentation stopped - if you get the same gravity reading in a row it basically means fermentation has stopped or is stuck. I would like it to go a bit lower, but I don't think it will as we're almost at 80% attenuation rate.
The wort is beer by now, it's clearing; it looks and smells like beer.
I had a little taste to see how it's progressing; at this moment it tastes pretty bland, wheaty flavours coming out and it's flat as it hasn't been through a second fermentation. Best way to describe the taste at this early stage is simply beery, heh.
To give it a little kick we add some hops; adding hops after the fermentation has finished is called dryhopping.
This time I chose an American hops I've never tried before. It was recommended to me by the shopkeeper of a homebrew place I went to last week. It's called Cluster and it's a hop variety with a relatively low Alpha Acid content of 5.3% meaning the balance between bitterness and hoppyness will be tipped in the later's favour.
I'm using 100g of dried flowers for my 21 litre batch which should hop it up quite well, I've done batches with 28g and that was enough so this should kick things up a notch.
The hops smell great, I love the fruitiness they give off.
It would be best to use a hopping bag but I don't have one and I'm out of muslin so I'm dropping the hops straight in the fermenting bucket.
Give everything a little stir to mix it up and get the hops wet so some may sink.
If in a couple of days all the hops is still on top which I suspect it will, I will put a layer of muslin on top and push the hops under the liquid line.
That's about it for this stage; we need to give it more time again for the alcohol in the beer to start breaking down the hops and extract all the oils from it. We're going to give 1 to 2 weeks for this process, 72 hours is enough as well, but I prefer longer periods as it allows the yeast to pull more stuff down from the beer clearing it more in the process.
Thanks for following my little beer's journey from sugary concoction to deliciousness!