Thar she blows!

No, this isn't a post about "The Whale Below" or the pirate anthology or anything directly writing related. This is a post about booze. Yesterday I mentioned the muscadines (and they smell heavenly in the refrigerator) and homebrewing, and last night I took it upon myself to commence the fermentation of my planned batch of beer. Those muscadines won't keep forever, you know.

I took the can of liquid extract (Cooper's "Dark Ale" kit) and did the normal heating and mixing with hot water rigamarole, then added the pound of dark malt extract I'd bought at Austin Homebrew Supply two weeks back. Then I added enough water to bring the total volume up to six gallons, and pitched the yeast (which I'd rehydrated while doing everything else). Then I set everything up in my office in hopes fermentation would take hold.

Astute homebrewers will be thinking at this point, "Well, that's all right and good, but beer kits call for two pounds of fermentable sugars, and he only added the one pound of malt." This is true, but I've also got a pound of raw honey I plan to add to make up the balance. Since unpasteurized honey has all sorts of wild yeasts and bacteria suspended in it, dormant, I wanted to make sure the wort had a good head of fermentation steam going before I added the honey. A bit of cautionary insurance, so to speak. I've had brews go bad or get stuck halfway through fermentation, and it ain't pretty.

So this morning I went to check on the beer, to see how it was doing. Holy moly! Was it fermenting, and how! The wort had foamed up inside the container so that suds were forcing their way up through the airlock and coming out the top. It looked like Larry Fine from the Three Stooges. Now in the decade-plus I've been homebrewing this has never happened to me, although I've heard it can. There was nothing I could do but clean out the airlock, wipe up the beer foam and wrap towels around everything to soak up the suds and spilled liquid that escape. I think the question of whether or not a good, strong fermentation would take hold is pretty much answered now.

Glad I held off on adding that honey, though. Now I'm more concerned about letting the fermentation slow down before adding additional sugars--at the rate it's going, it may well blow the entire lid off...

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