Kölsch update.

Madison.

I've had a number of folks ask about the status of the last batch of homebrew, and, in short, I still don't know. My position at this point is that, should there be two cases of intact bottles when I return from Europe after two weeks, I'll consider it a success. Here's the breakdown, as I understand it:

• The January basement temperature was far too cold for ale yeast, but wouldn't keep cold long enough for lagering, so the fermentation had to take place in the apartment proper. I managed to make this work last year, but it appears that the temperature swings for this batch forced a large proportion of the yeast to precipitate out prematurely.¹ When I racked to the secondary, not a whole lot of yeast made the trip.
  
  
• After a week in the primary, the specific gravity had dropped to 1.022, well above the 1.013 target for this batch. So, I gave it a three weeks in the secondary, until all signs of fermentation had stopped, before bottling.
  
  
• When prepping for bottling, I dropped the hydrometer.² Crossing my fingers, I went ahead and bottled anyway, then tested again a week later when I had a chance to pick up another hydrometer. The result? 1.022 again, meaning there's plenty of sugars left in those bottles to keep any remaining yeast well-fed. And producing copious amounts of carbon dioxide inside closed, breakable containers.
  
  
• Two weeks after bottling, the beer's fully carbonated, and the gravity's dropped to 1.020. At this point, the beer smells pretty good, but the continuing fermentation has me worried. Perhaps the cooler basement temperatures can slow the process down.
  
  
• Now, the bottles are inside their cases, wrapped in a dual layer of heavy-duty trash bags. If they break - assuming that any bottle explosions aren't violent enough to tear open the bags - at least I'll have less mess to clean.

In two weeks: drinkable beer or an expensive lesson learned. Also: pictures or brand-new labels or broken glass!

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¹Yeast are really finicky about temperature, which is why I usually ferment in the basement, where the earth's thermal mass really moderates the temperature variation. Too much temperature change will usually cause them to go dormant, as will temperatures below their preferred range; too high and they simply die en masse; and differences of just a few degrees can drastically affect the flavor profile produced during fermentation.

²Not that this really needs to be said, but don't drop one of these. In addition to making it impossible to check the beer's gravity, they're made of very thin, delicate glass that's alarmingly difficult to find when scattered across the kitchen floor.