Pumpkinman
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- Oct 20, 2012
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I just pulled a 6 gallon carboy that I had placed outside to cold crash (Home brewings version of cold stabilizing to clarify the beer) I had it outside for 3 days in temps between 15° - 35° and had to look at it tonite, only to find that I had a 6 inch layer at the top that was frozen slush...
Of course I pulled it inside immediately and let it warm up for an hr, but that nice light American Pale ale that I brewed for my buddies that drink p**s water like bud, had become an amber brew that had a noticeably stronger malt flavor and you could tell that the ABV had increased due to the water freezing.
***Please Note**** I am not in any way shape or form suggesting that anyone should purposely freeze their beer, or any degree of fractional freezing of their beer, cider, wine and so on, to raise their ABV%, this is merely a way of warning other to be more attentive than I was. ****
Now comes the interesting part, I normally fine my beer with gelatin, normal unflavored Knoxx gelatin, I've never had any problem until this batch, apparently gelatin doesn't like the temps that it was exposed to, instead of it binding to any hops and traub in suspension and dropping it to the bottom of the carboy, large clumps of it remained in suspension just under the frost line in the carboy....hmmmmmm......well, once again, thank God for the All In One Wine pump, I filtered the beer with a 5 micron filter, resulting in a crystal clear beer!
I lost approx 1-1.5 gallons of water by volume.
I ended up adding approx one half gallon of water in the form of priming sugar solution, this brought the brew back to looking and tasting like an APA again, and added 1 gram of EC-1118 yeast to the bottling bucket just in case the freezing or the filtering did a number on the yeast necessary to carbonate the beer, and bottled this batch.
Adding 1 gram of EC-1118 at bottling is common practice when making an Oktoberfest or many other lagers, and works like a charm.
Of course I pulled it inside immediately and let it warm up for an hr, but that nice light American Pale ale that I brewed for my buddies that drink p**s water like bud, had become an amber brew that had a noticeably stronger malt flavor and you could tell that the ABV had increased due to the water freezing.
***Please Note**** I am not in any way shape or form suggesting that anyone should purposely freeze their beer, or any degree of fractional freezing of their beer, cider, wine and so on, to raise their ABV%, this is merely a way of warning other to be more attentive than I was. ****
Now comes the interesting part, I normally fine my beer with gelatin, normal unflavored Knoxx gelatin, I've never had any problem until this batch, apparently gelatin doesn't like the temps that it was exposed to, instead of it binding to any hops and traub in suspension and dropping it to the bottom of the carboy, large clumps of it remained in suspension just under the frost line in the carboy....hmmmmmm......well, once again, thank God for the All In One Wine pump, I filtered the beer with a 5 micron filter, resulting in a crystal clear beer!
I lost approx 1-1.5 gallons of water by volume.
I ended up adding approx one half gallon of water in the form of priming sugar solution, this brought the brew back to looking and tasting like an APA again, and added 1 gram of EC-1118 yeast to the bottling bucket just in case the freezing or the filtering did a number on the yeast necessary to carbonate the beer, and bottled this batch.
Adding 1 gram of EC-1118 at bottling is common practice when making an Oktoberfest or many other lagers, and works like a charm.
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