Beer and Brewing Journal

Brew day went smooth thanks to having the entire day free (read: no stress or hurried process).Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day and it definitely felt like spring. Total brew day was about five hours including cleanup.
I bought a new bucket for sanitizer when making starters. It fits in the kitchen sink and I can completely submerse my 2000ml Erlenmeyer flask in it. I felt like I needed to up the clean process a little for my starters and having this big bucket of sanitizer, instead of a salad bowl, helps.
Again, like last brew, I didn’t have enough water in the boil (gravity was too high). I need to remember not to get caught by this, especially since I didn’t measure gravity until I had 10 min left in the boil. I added about half gallon of water to get gravity to 1.056 but it took 5 minutes to get water back to boil and I had two hops additions left. So my 5 minute addition was more like a 9 minute addition….big deal. I just need to remember to check gravity with 15 plus minutes left. Good news is that I hit my numbers.
I used the WLP002 English Ale Yeast. The tube did seem like it had a lot of yeast in it. In fact it seemed to have more in it than when I first brought it home (hmmm). Tube was very thick as there wasn’t too much liquid left. The yeast itself seems thick in general. (note: after researching the yeast on the white labs website, it turns out this is very typical for this yeast strain. It is a highly flocculent yeast and coagulates in the shipping tube). When I stopped my stirplate in the morning the yeast settled out quickly and was almost a past at the bottom of the flask. When I started the plate again, the yeast starting kicking around in big chunks. The fermentation seems similar to the Irish Ale yeast. About four inches of kreusen in the morning…..no super kreusen coming out of the carboy, like the Edinburgh yeast.