No place like foam

I have 10 gallons of partially fermented beer in my closet. In about an hour or so, I'm going to do some siphoning. The hefeweizen will go into the bottling bucket. Then the secondary fermentor will get cleaned and santized so that the ESB can go in. Then the hefeweizen goes into the carboy. See, the hefeweizen didn't ferment properly. There are at least two reasons for this: 1) I didn't chill fast enough and 2) poor (very poor) aeration. The first thing is actually ridiculously easy to fix. I used to pour the hot wort into the plastic bucket and then chill. Nonsense. The kettle can go straight into an ice bath in the sink and it insulates (probably) far less than the plastic. I also added a bag of ice to the wort (and next time I won't use store bought). Temperature dropped about 100 degrees in roughly five minutes. Hoorah. For the aeration, I went more high tech. Bought a plug-in device similar to ones used in fish tanks which forces oxygen into the wort. The result? Happy yeast bubbling merrily for about four days. I would have been happier if it had gone on a bit longer, but I'm guardedly optimistic.

The weissbier may be a lost cause. There is a chance that pouring it onto the yeast from the ESB may revive it, but I'm not going to hold my breath. If I had a still, I'd try to distill it. That would sort out the low alcohol and then some. Until then, I suppose I'll just hope for the best and drink it as it is.

Ten gallons in a few weeks. Can't wait.