Cool Nights & Coolships

It’s my winter break and I’ve spent my time off from school trying to learn and experiment more in my quest to brew great beer. I brewed a Ten Fidy clone, a Grapefruit IPAand spontaneously fermented some of the runnings from the stout brew in a coolship, a la Jester King.

Happy new year brewday! Zesting grapefruits to go in the boil for my Pallast Boint GFIPA clone. pic.twitter.com/P9SygCuwt2

— James Sutton (@_james_sutton_) January 1, 2016

While I did not do a turbid mash, I believe that in my usage of my coolship, I spontaneous fermented my beer. I took the last bit of my runnings from my stout in partiglye fashion and boiled them for 60 minutes with just a small addition of fuggle hops, for their preservative properties. The result was a very lightly hopped, low gravity wort that I hoped would decrease the potential osmotic pressure of the wort on the yeast and bacteria I was hoping that would inoculate my wort. To this end, I took the still hot wort outside in the brew kettle, tied some muslin over top to keep bugs out, and let it sit over night, as the temperature was set to drop to around 30F overnight. In the morning, I funneled my beer into a small fermenter and waited. And waited. And waited. I waited 3 days before any fermentation started, a worrying period of time for me. When using pure cultures, the fermentation processes are typically visibly active within 12 hours. In this period of time, even though I knew it would take time, I began to fret and I even considered trying to inoculate the beer by dropping spruce tips into the brew directly, which would’ve likely yielded a similar result as I let my coolship sit outside near my parent’s evergreen trees overnight in Murphy, TX. I am excited to see what the microflora of the suburbs have to offer.

After a few days farmhouse stout is finally fermenting. Can't wait to see what wild yeast of Murphy TX has to offer. pic.twitter.com/mdt4ElhKrc

— James Sutton (@_james_sutton_) January 3, 2016

In my break, I am also reading Sam Calagione’s book on starting his own brewery, Yeast by Jamail Z. and Chris White of White Labs, and the Principles of Brewing Sciences by George Fix. I’m hoping to gain some more experience working with yeast and beer when I graduate in May so these books have been helpful to that end. The Brewing Science book has also been helpful as I begin designing my senior project on hop utilization, and then Sam’s book is to, hopefully, help me open my own brewery one day. It is important to me that I learn and try to better myself everyday and I have really done that this break. I feel that as humans, we are by nature creative beings and we all crave to create and have a creative spirit within us. Brewing is great because it allows me to be creative and also use my love of science to help. I realize this blog is not terribly well written, but I just hope to document my own thought process as I continue my journey in beer in my (hopefully) ultimate creative undertaking: to open my own brewery one day.