FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM

So I came home from Vermont last night to see an awesome sight. The airlock was full of gunk (foam) showing that I had a very vigorous fermentation while I was away. This is an awesome sign. Well, I mean, you don't really want gunk in your fermenter, but like, it's better than no activity what so ever. It was encouraging to not have any mess outside the airlock, meaning I didn't have much to clean up.

I figured this would be a good time to take a gravity reading as well to find out if there was gonna be more fermentation, or if this was starting to stabilize and be done after five days of action. I popped the lid and saw a glorious sight -- a massive krausen still on top. I sterilized the turkey baster and grabbed a sample. 1.0125 at 67 degrees (so 1.0133 corrected for temperature). Dead on. This is very promising! Sadly I dumped the sample before I remembered I should have tasted it. Oh well. I then cleaned out the airlock and sterilized it again, filled it with more vodka and set it back up. This'll sit for at least another five days and then I'll transfer it to my better bottle and lager it at 40° F for at least two weeks.

The good news comes from the math though! Well, good and bad news. The bad news is that apparently I have become absolutely HORRIBLE at doing math. The good news though is that the apparent attenuation of the yeast hit 76% which is dead center for the range on the Wyeast German Ale. (1.054 - 1.013 = 41; 41/54 = 76%). I'm also showing an approximate 5.1% ABV. All these data fit the North German Alt profile perfectly. It's gonna be a hard 3 weeks to wait!