OTFPOTD 02/15/09 - Repurposing Mr. Beer as a Cask edition

Well, I'm going to be racking my root beer to the secondary fermenter next weekend.  I could probably do it now, but I haven't taken any hydrometer readings, and I'm sure it'll be OK to rack in a week.  The problem with racking beer too early from the primary is risk of making bombs.

If you're not sure Racking is the process transferring the beer from the primary to the secondary or to bottle.  You want to make sure fermentation is done, either by doing successive hydrometer readings, or just waiting long enough (2 weeks for normal beers).

The Root beer has a wonderful rootbeer like flavor.  It also looks like root beer one my last poll, so when I finally bring some beer around, it'll be a root beer.  Probably just use a decent extract syrup, a few spices, malt extract and molasses.

I'll be bottling my heather ale tonight.  My next project might be a session style ale or a cask ale, like real ale or a casked mild ale.  I realized that 2 Mr. Beer fermenters hold 2.5 gallons of beer.  They're only useful as a 2 gallon primary fermenter, so I've considered them for test batches, but now I an thinking of making a 5 gallon batch and splitting it in half, one in each fermenter.  I'd make a small beer (I SWEAR I'm not obsessed with small beers), since I'd be forced to drink 2.5 gallons of beer as soon as I started drinking it.  You don't use additional sugars to carbonate, so it'd taste flat compared to what you're probably used to.  I could get one of those expanders, like they use in a party pig, they expand as the beer empties to keep it from spoiling.  Then I could make a higher alcohol beer and not be forced to drink it ASAP.  If the Mr. Beer works as a cask, I'll let you know. 

Did you know George Washington had a beer recipe.  It's a molasses small beer. 

http://www.beerhistory.com/library/holdings/washingtonrecipe.shtml