After a few more days of letting everything sit, it was time to get the homebrews final gravities measured and kegged – on Friday I cracked open the clone and took a refractometer reading… oddly enough it hadn’t budged in over a week, so I decided to take a hydrometer reading as well – and that measured at 1.014, a far cry from the 1.028 that the refractometer was recording, meaning that I hit my targets dead on. I took a couple other reading of different things with sugar concentrations and couldn’t get the refractometer to change its reading, so something is off with it. I got the commercial clone kit partially bottled for submission and kegged the remaining. I do have to say that I believe I have a chance of placing in this one – even uncarbed, the flavor profile was pretty close. Add some carbonation, I think it’s going to be spot on. I CO2 purged that keg and brought it up to about 12 PSI to carbonate and store until I finish my commercial keg of the same beer.
I figured since I was kegging, I’d peek in at my Dunkle, which was on about day 11, so at a minimum I could pull the collection container and get it going into a secondary fermentation. The airlock had slowed to a little burp every 60 or so seconds, petered out from where it had once been with a bubble almost constantly. I decided to pull the collection container at the bottom, clean and sanitize it, and replace it to catch any other matter that may fall and let the beer finish fermenting out for another couple of days. On Sunday I checked in again noticing that there appeared to be no more signs of fermentation and decided that an additional two days was likely enough settling. I needed another keg, so I growlered off the last little bit of the Vienna Cream Ale I tried making last year, washed and sanitized that keg, and opened up the Dunkle fermenter.
The Dunkle had a Final Gravity of 1.015, with an OG of 1.057 makes it 5.51% ABV – and even uncarbonated has a great flavor. I got it racked over, CO2 Purged the keg, hooked it up to about 10 PSI (my serving pressure) and put it in the kegerator. I’ll let it condition for about a week, and will tap it this weekend to see what it’s like!
With two full kegs I probably won’t be brewing again until late spring or early summer, when I’d like to experiment with some of the higher temperature, fast fermenting Kveik Yeasts to make a Farmhouse Ale, Pseudo-Lager, or Kolsch.
Roving On 