Monday, June 3, 2013

Hefeweis City, Part II

I suppose I should explain why I'm calling the blog posts about the hefeweisen "Hefeweis City".  As I mentioned in the previous post, this beer was partly an introduction to homebrewing for a friend.  I don't expect he'll take the plunge into homebrewing himself, but he enjoys craft beer and seems curious about my brewing.

As you may have guessed, "Hefeweis City" is the name of the beer.  I let my friend pick the name, partly because it was his first brew and partly because I didn't have any ideas myself.  It's based off Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (he had video games on the brain; the alternate was "M. Weisen", a play off of the Street Fighter character M. Bison.

Fermentation went very quickly.  In my last order I picked up one of the paddle aerators that fits into a drill, and a couple of minutes with that I suspect provided all the oxygen the yeast needed.  Fermentation started later that same evening, and the krausen had fallen by the next day.

By the end of the week there were no bubbles in the airlock, and I started taking gravity readings.  I was concerned that perhaps my hydrometer was off, because it kept reading about 1.000 (1.002 adjusted for temperature), but I didn't worry too much because the readings were consistent over several days.  At that point I knew that the gravity wasn't excessively high (indicating a stuck fermentation) or still ongoing, so a week after brewing we bottled.  I was a little apprehensive about it, but it seemed to be ready.

Bottling with two people is the way to go.  Besides the fact that bottling consists primarily of two activities that can't be done simultaneously by one person (filling and capping), I didn't have a bunch of filled bottles sitting around ready to be knocked over.  I filled, he capped, and we zipped through it.  Best of all, he could tip the bottling bucket for me when we got down near the bottom (I don't have a dip tube yet) and I could concentrate on bottling.

For labels, I typically use Avery 8160 labels; They're 1" x 2 5/8", large enough to hold a decently large title and other information--I generally add the style and bottling date, although this time I stuck the brewers' names on there as well (so my friend can show off beer with his name on the bottle). 

I downloaded the font used in Vice City and made up some nice labels:


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