T Bone Industries

sean dreilinger: beer? in a glass bottle? how do you keep the bottle from exploding?

noromdiam: I know, huh?!

We let the primary fermentation go until it's completely done bubbling. So there's only a tiny bit of yeast left to carbonate the beer in secondary fermentation.

noromdiam: It is hard to believe this much awesomeness can be contained in a mere glass bottle.

sean dreilinger: is primary fermentation in a bigger bottle or pot? how do you decide when to bottle it? by taste? smell? rate of bubbling?

i'm making trial & error ginger beer here, all of the recipes i've looked at seem to bottle it the same day its brewed and put it in the fridge to stop the yeast after 24-48 hours (maybe to avoid creating too much alcohol?).

if the yeast is still alive and well when i put it into the fridge, won't it come back to life when the beer is consumed?

i went looking for the pros and cons of ingesting active yeast and all i find is a patent about doing so deliberately to reduce your blood alcohol level when drinking:
www.google.com/patents/about?id=XqsHAAAAEBAJ

noromdiam: Primary fermentation is usually in a large carboy or sealed bucket that lets the carbon dioxide escape through an airlock, so Tim and I typically decide to bottle once the rate of bubbling has slowed down pretty significantly to like a bubble every minute or so. As a result of letting the CO2 escape, the beer mainly becomes more alcoholic. The wort going into primary fermentation has a crapload of sugar, like 50%. So the longer you let it sit in primary fermentation, the more alcoholic it will be, that's pretty much why we let it go for so long when most people bottle after 2 weeks. The caveat of a long primary fermentation is off-flavors from oxidation which can be avoided by reducing the amount of contact with air (a.k.a. filling the carboy nearly all the way full).

We add some priming sugar to the beer at bottling time, but it's a small amount, like a cup of priming sugar to 5 gallons of beer, not enough to explode a glass bottle.

Also, baker's yeast is extremely robust compared to most beer yeast strains. For a less robust yeast that has more interesting flavor profile, you could save the sediment from a Belgian beer and use that for ginger ale.

Here's a link to a beer brewing website, most of the content has been published in the form of a very good book with updated editions, but this site remains very comprehensive:
www.howtobrew.com/intro.html


In the last week or so, I have come across some information about beer's counterindication to gout, something about all the yeast DNA being converted into uric acid which collects in joints.

noromdiam: Oh yeah, we also rack the beer (filter out large particulates and leave yeast sediment behind) about a week to 2 weeks after we start the brew, and then rack again at bottling time.

Our filter is a bit of cheese cloth affixed to a champagne cork basket that gets clamped onto the tubing at the aspirating end, in other words, only meant to filter out hops.

If you use a better mesh, you can add a much smaller amount of yeast when you transfer to bottle = less exploding glass bottles.