Making 40 Pints of Woodforde’s Wherry with a Youngs Kit – Part 3

Food and drink. Shelter and warmth. Sex. Intoxication. Since the dawn of time, these have been the first things that human beings have sought. Not necessarily in that order.

So my home brewing saga is a retelling of an ancient tale; the latest iteration burped out by the collective unconscious.

We left my five gallons of wort fermenting away happily in the garage. I waited for seven days and seven nights. Then I resumed my endeavours.

Step 6 – The Hydrometer

Before you move to the next step, you have to make sure that primary fermentation is complete – that is, that the yeast has turned enough of the sugar to ethanol for the beer to be the right strength.

Remember – ethanol, good: makes you drunk. Methanol, bad: makes you go blind. You’ve got to have a system.

You do this:

• By seeing if the wort has stopped bubbling – ie stopped producing CO2.
• By testing the specific gravity of what you’ve got.

You do the former with your eyes – the latter with an instrument called a hydrometer. Filling a measuring

tube with beer-like substance, one drops the hydrometer in and the level it floats at tells you (basically) how much thicker than water it is.

I did this once and, well, I didn’t put enough beer in the tube as the hydrometer sank to the bottom. I took this as meaning it wasn’t boozy enough and I left it for another couple of days.

Then I did it again, and it looked to me as though we were at the desired 1.104 level.

Now, I was going on holiday the following day, so I may have resolved in my mind to move to the next stage ANYWAY, but the reading appeared to be in order.

Step 7 - To Keg-a Therion

It was at this point that I realised I should have siphoned the beer out for the hydrometer test, rather than just dunking my tube in it. My measuring tube, I mean. Again, I had imperilled the final product by the risk of contamination.

Regardless, I went on to sterilise (i) my keg, (ii) my siphon and (iii) the pressurised lid. Same process as before although the brass lid had to be done just in hot water rather than steriliser. So it wasn’t so much sterile as “hot”.

I also had cause to delve into Elvira’s mystery cupboards of cosmetics on the hunt for Vaseline. I had been instructed to “liberally grease the o-ring” lest a seal not form properly.

Come on now. This isn’t one of those blogs.

So, having liberally greased my o-ring – that is, the threads on both the brass top and the keg onto which the former screwed – I began to siphon.

You do this as follows:

• Put the keg on a surface lower down than the primary fermenting vessel, so that gravity is on your side.
• Stick one end of the siphon into the wort.
• Suck on the other end.
• Stop your futile sucking and open the tap on the siphon. Suck it again, until the beer reaches your mouth.
• Immediately take the mouth end of the siphon and stick it in the bottom of the keg.

I found this part rather magical. I don’t quite understand the physics behind it, but by that single suck, all the beer transferred itself gradually from one container to the other.

Did I say “all”? Well. In my case, I found myself with about a gallon left over in the PFV once the keg was full. Both were ostensibly five gallon/40 litre containers. I had filled the PFV to the very top, imagining THAT was five gallons, but clearly it wasn’t. Again Youngs, more detail required.

I left the remaining gallon in the PFV, not entirely sure what I was going to do with it. And there it remains.

OK, into the keg went about 100g of brewers sugar. This caused the contents to fizz up and spill over the floor, as the keg was extremely full. I screwed on the brass lid, greasy o-ring to greasy o-ring. And we were done for another week.