Today was an early start with moving the Saison out of the primary and onto the secondary. I would have liked to go into bottles, but it was not time yet. The gravity of the Saison was still high at 1.020. My goal for it is to have it move down to 1.016. Hopefully with the heat going into the 90s this week it will push the gravity a little lower. Why move the beer over? Well, I wanted to wash the yeast and clear up the carboys to brew my Nut Brown ale.
Washing yeast is actually really easy. The day before I boiled a pot with 3 pint jars and a pyrex bowl. I put the jars in the fridge over night and let them cool down while being sanitized. When you have racked the beer off of the yeast, you are of course left with the yeast cake. I dumped the sanitized water from the jars and pyrex into the carboy and shook it around to get the yeast back into suspension. I then used my auto-siphon to rack the yeast over to the mason jars. My process I adapted from a post on Homebrewtalk.com about yeast washing - it worked out great!
Washing yeast is actually really easy. The day before I boiled a pot with 3 pint jars and a pyrex bowl. I put the jars in the fridge over night and let them cool down while being sanitized. When you have racked the beer off of the yeast, you are of course left with the yeast cake. I dumped the sanitized water from the jars and pyrex into the carboy and shook it around to get the yeast back into suspension. I then used my auto-siphon to rack the yeast over to the mason jars. My process I adapted from a post on Homebrewtalk.com about yeast washing - it worked out great!
After the yeast washing it was a pretty straightforward to brew my nut brown. I've done this one before so it was a pretty routine brew day. Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll be bottling a couple delicious brews! In fact, the fermenting started without a hitch!