Making beer in the dark

Until yesterday, I was pretty worried about my sophomore batch of beer. I barely had time to write up my last blog entry before taking off for the holidays. I was well on my way to Carrie's parents' house before the any visibile evidence of fermentation occurred. A lot of the fun in brewing beer in my opinion is watching it ferment, even though all you can really see is the carbon dioxide escaping out of the airlock.

On Christmas day, we picked up my brother and drove straight to the airport for a visit to Tennessee. While there, I had other things on my mind such as playing with my adorable niece Emily. In fact, I was planning on calling my roommate Mike and have him check on the beer but even that slipped my mind. Due to a late return to Texas, I didn't get a chance to look at the beer until January 1st. There wasn't any evidence of bubbles in the airlock so I was nervous until I popped the lid of the primary fermenter. About an inch above the beer was a ring of foam, so something had worked. I transferred the liquid to my secondary fermenter and took a specific gravity reading. It had already reached its target reading of 1.014 which means that everything worked just fine without me. While the beer clarifies this week, I will start cleaning my beer bottles to get them ready to fill on Saturday or Sunday.