My homebrew altbier has been in primary fermentation for a solid week now and I just racked it to secondary fermentation this past Sunday. Actually, that’s a bit misleading. While there still may be some fermentation taking place with the residual yeasts still in suspension, what I actually did was rack the altbier to a secondary container in the hopes that it’ll clear up a little bit more. Once I bottle it, then the altbier will undergo a secondary fermentation that will result in carbonation.
One of the things you can do though while racking your homebrew to a secondary container for clarifying is to take another hydrometer reading. A hydrometer measures the amount of residual sugars still within the liquid. I took a hydrometer reading before fermentation that gave me an Original Gravity of 1.060 (aka ten-sixty) with a Final Gravity of 1.016. After running the numbers through a simple formula, I calculated my altbier to have a 5.895%ABV. For those who are really curious, here’s the formula:
(O.G. – F.G.) * 131 = %ABV (alcohol by volume)
I got to taste it before carbonation and the beer has an initial malt-forward flavor that is a little sweet with dark fruit undertones balanced out by a medium intensity hop bitterness and flavor. There’s not much on the nose of this beer but that might change a bit after the beer gets carbonated. Although I am not expecting it to.
I did have a picture of the altbier still in primary and I wanted to post it but I am having trouble connecting to the server BetterBeerBlog is hosted on. I’ll have to shoot out an email tonight and see if I can get that resolved.
Related posts:
- Homebrew Session – Altbier Most of my beer knowledge comes from my homebrewing background....
