Damage control: Homebrew Edition

When last we spoke, I'd laid out a lament about lost plum wine and how my recovery process involved starting a six-gallon batch of dark ale. But something was nagging me, something I couldn't put my finger on. That usually spells trouble.

Figure it out I did, although it took a couple of days. I'd added one pound of dark malt as the supplemental sugar, which all liquid malt extract kits require, but it slowly dawned on me that this was an unusually low amount of additional sugar. The instructions had said one pound, right? I'd checked before purchasing the dark malt, which is why I just bought one pound instead of more. Except... when I pull out the instruction sheet to verify this, to my chagrin I see that the kit requires 1 kg of extra sugar. Kilogram. Not pound.

Well, crap. A kilogram is a little more than two pounds. It's not a ruined batch--the extract kit has lots of malt, and I did add another pound, so it would ferment (and indeed was fermenting) just fine as-is. But it'd be relatively weak ale. If I wanted weak beer, I'd go to Oklahoma. What to do? I didn't have any more malt to add, and I didn't have the time to make another trip to San Antonio. Table sugar was an option, but to my mind, refined cane sugar is throwing in the towel, and it seemed somehow wrong to put that in a dark ale that was all-malt up unto this point. Then it struck me--brown sugar.

Now, a lot of people avoid using brown sugar in homebrew because it has a strong flavor. In fact, this is why dextrose corn sugar is so popular with home brewers, because it adds almost no flavor to beer or other fermented beverage. Brown sugar is like the anti-dextrose. But since I was only adding a relatively small portion, and the brew is dark and flavorful already, it seemed a worthwhile experiment. So I picked up a pound of brown sugar, making sure it was unadulterated brown sugar, as opposed to refined sugar back-mixed with molasses, and added it to the wort.

Several days later, the fermentation is finally slowing down. We managed to survive the blow-out phase without a huge foaming mess taking over my office. Temperatures have stayed below 80 degrees as well, ensuring an optimal environment for the fermentation without the formation of harsh fusel alcohols. At this rate, it may be ready to bottle by Sunday. I don't know how it will taste, but it smells good at any rate.

Oh, yeah. I also added potassium sorbate to my two batches of mead. That should neutralize any yeast that survived the campden tablets, priming the mead for back-sweetening sometime next week or thereafter. After the loss of all that potentially great plum wine, I want to get these in bottles ASAP.

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