My favorite part was checking gravities. The magic smell of the open fermenters—bright fruit esters; pungent, heady hops; and CO2. You’d walk into the room and there’d be a profound quietness, loaded with the aromas of wort being transformed to beer. You’d lift up a heavy stainless lid to see the white, rocky foam head of high krausen (the part where the yeast has reproduced itself enough to tackle the full amount of sugars and is beginning to go apeshit), flecked with tan bits of protein, its stillness like a blanket covering the furiously churning liquid beneath. Always a morning task, it was the identical feeling to entering a church. Slowly and with reverence.
Spray a sample valve with sanitizer and open it to let foamy beer half-fill a plastic liter-size pitcher. Then swirl it or pour back and forth between two pitchers to degas the sample, otherwise the gravity reading will not be accurate. Pour the sample into a cylinder and float a glass hydrometer in it, giving it a little spin as it goes in, pushing the foam out the top with your finger, blowing some more off the top so that it doesn’t obscure the notches on the hydrometer's side.
If you take the reading right away, it will be low. Let settle a few minutes until the glass stops rising. Gravity represents the density of sugars in solution—it decreases as fermentation progresses and yeast consumes maltose, etc. Next, record your reading in degrees Plato on the fermentation graph sheet inside a plastic sleeve hooked to the side of the tank. Then walk back out into the fast chaos of the brewery, feeling ready for anything.
Words by Charlie Cummings Photo by Annie Prafcke