Pursuing Calefaction

The amber ale has more or less finished primary fermentation. The frothy mess at the top (the krausen) hasn’t yet fallen, but CO₂ outgassing is down to one bubble every twenty seconds or so. I am not in the habit of transferring to secondary, as I haven’t done any dry hopping, and there’s no need for this batch either. I had fun keeping it at 66F; my swamp cooling has proved effective. Thank goodness we have a tight closet–the technique is useless in a big open area unless you have a monster fan.

Now I can more or less ignore it until a week and a half before Thanksgiving. The major takeaway from this batch: I desperately need to make a displacement measurement stick for my kettle. I dumped the gallon of top-up water in the fermenter before racking, and only after I had gotten the yeast pitched did I realize that I might have diluted it too much. And most of my estimations thereafter point to that likelihood. I’m not upset–it’ll still be beer. But it was bad science. Had I taken the time to make a measurement tool beforehand, I would have known with certainty how much water I should have added to hit my OG.