Day 5: Into the Fridge!

Saturday, February 28th, 2009: The pressure in the beer machine has dropped down to 15 PSI, and the bubbles have begun to slow quite a bit. I'm pretty sure this means that it has completed fermentation. The instructions said to pour a small sample at this point, and said that if it isn't sweet, then fermentation is complete. I did that, and the sample was, as expected, quite cloudy. This is due to the fact that the conditioning phase has yet to occur. I waited for the head to settle a little and then gave it a taste, and it was a little... sour. Sort of like strange, sour Budweiser. Not good. The booklet states that a sour taste can be imparted by bacteria growing in the beer, which produces an acid. This can happen when the brewing environment is not totally sterile... which may well have been caused by using the beer mix which had a slit in the bag. The lady on the customer service line said that it should still be ok, but I had wondered about this. Turns out my fears may be true. Oh, well... I put the beer machine in the fridge to let it go through the conditioning phase, which removes the haziness and allows the CO2 to absorb into the beer. This takes 4-5 days. I'll sample the beer again once this is complete, and if it still tastes sour, I'll know why.

As a side note, I had a bit of trouble getting the beer machine to even FIT in the fridge. It was too big to fit in my little beer fridge at all, so I planned on putting it on the top shelf of the main fridge. The only problem with this was that when I'd put the beer machine in the fridge before I started all this to see if it would fit, I hadn't attached the pressurization unit yet. With that on, the beer machine now requires 13 inches of clearance... and was now too tall. So, I had to make some less-than-optimal adjustments to the shelf positioning to make the machine fit.