fermentation update

48 hours later fermentation is finally underway.  I noticed little clumps of krausen starting to form this morning before leaving for work and this evening upon arriving home the airlock was happily bubbling away about 1/min.  The krausen is still pretty thin, and I expect that things will pick up as the yeast has some more time to get going.

In other news, the under the table swamp cooler (pictured below) seems to be doing pretty well.  I’m swapping out small blocks of ice about 3 times a day (morning, evening, midnight) and it’s been in the high 60s for the last 24 hours.  It could be that we’ve turned the AC down to 70 or that the temperature outside has been steadily dropping as well.  Whatever it is, I’m not going to complain.  I struggled to keep my last batch within the mid 70s using a similar set up in the basement and this is a grand improvement.  Hopefully it lasts long enough to see us through fermentation and into conditioning when I’ll stop adding ice to increase the temperature and prod a few more yeasties into getting back into the business of cleaning up after themselves.

I dropped in on the bottles conditioning in the basement.  The 750ml belgians were beginning to mushroom from the pressure, so it looks like we didn’t manage to mess anything up too badly on Friday.  The bottles were hazy with some sediment already forming on the bottom. I’m planning to pull one or two to refrigerate thursday night so we can taste the fruits of our labors at one week on Friday.  If it’s done carbonating, I’ll probably throw a few more in the fridge for the weekend.