A return to Brewing

Well, it's been a few months since I've been here, but the brewing thing ran into a few snags. The oatmeal porter from my last post wound up with a nasty bacterial infection which continued on the next 4 or 5 batches (including the promised Belgian).

Ryan got all the bugs worked out (no pun intended), and brewed up a few fantastic batches for his wedding. Knowing this, I finally got off my slack ass (well, Ryan said, "wanna brew this weekend?") and made up yet another "Fridge Cleaner" recipe to help lower our stock of old grain and hops.

If you are interested, here is the recipe.

We got started a little late, around 13:00, and wanted to take a lot of new pictures with the new camera. The grain selection went fine, with a quick off-the-cuff substitution of roasted barley for black barley. We used up the last of the Marris Otter bag and milled it all down.


I adjusted the water chemistry to be a little closer to England. Mash in went well with me manning the pipe (if you know what I mean), and Ryan doing the stirring. Target temp was 154F and we nailed it.


Minh made us some pizza and we snacked while waiting on the starch magic.


An hour later, we fired up the recirc (at that point Ryan realized he didn't put the stainless scrunchy under the false bottom, but *shrug* whatcha gonna do) and ran it for 25 minutes. It's a dark beer, and a little bit of bits aren't going to make much difference. A quick swap of the hoses and we were filling the kettle. For kicks, and because I'm a hop head, I threw in a handful of Northern Brewer as the level raised. Around 10 gallons, we fired up the burner to get things rolling, and topped off at 13 gallons. Eventually, finally, grudgingly it came to a boil. Hops were thrown in, a steady hand kept the top from coming off, and time passed.


We collected just under 10 gallons into two carboys - a 6 gallon Better Bottle, and a 7 gallon glass. We pitched packs of WYeast 1028 (London Ale), an old one (from January) and a fresh pack. The old one really didn't seem to have a lot of life in it, but I'm hoping the aggressive oxygenation of the wort will kick it in - we'll see.


Cleanup took a while now that we (well, Ryan) has found that total disassembly is needed to get into all the corners. It's worth it though. Pouring out beer sucks.

We hit a gravity of 1.064 from a target of 1.065. Not too bad. Smells and tastes great already. If the yeast kicks in, we'll have 10 gallons of greatness - if not, well, 5 gallons doesn't suck.

Well, I got about 1/2 way through this a couple of weeks ago, and promptly closed out the window... maybe this time I'll do the right thing :)

So, on March 3rd we brewed up another batch of beer. It was a BYO recipe for an Oatmeal stout. I'm scared to say it, but everything went perfectly. We spent the first hour or so cleaning the Ryan's kegerator which got us started about an hour late, and I was worried (as usual) that we would be rushed and screw something up. Well, this time we crushed the grain into a bucket, had accurate thermometers, a giant stainless steel spoon (which still isn't big enough, really) and things went really well. The worst problem we encountered (oh, and it was a big one) was that Ryan hadn't noticed that the recipe called for a 11.3 gallon mash. Our mash tun is 10 gallons. We wound up, oh say 1.3 gallons short in the boil kettle. We took a gravity reading hoping that our lower efficiency calculations would allow us a bit of leeway, and that we could just top up w/ water and maybe some DME. Well, like I said earlier, perfection was the word for the day. Our increased efficiency from the good grind and mash temps saved us. We just had to add the 1.3 gallons to hit exactly our desired OG. Cleanup went quickly and we were done with the entire thing in 5 hours.

I snagged a book Brew Like a Monk while at the beer store grabbing yeast for this brew. I'd be willing to be the next brew will be a Belgian :)

Dude! Where's my efficiency?

So, we brewed the 2nd batch on January 20th, and again ran into a few gremlins. The Thermosights decided they wanted to leak, and it was a real pain to get them to be drip free. We wound up using a plenty of pipe sealant, and that seemed to do the trick, although Ryan said it was leaking the next day. I think the fact the water was about 40F at that point may have done that, but we read a few posts online that recommend extra teflon tape and/or extra washers to fix it. We can give that a shot for next time. Regardless, we calibrated them, and are quite pleased overall.

Next up was the installation of the bottom heat shields. That went pretty well, except I tore the sheet aluminum while drilling the hole for the second one. A quick patch job and we were up an running. No problems now with the plywood.

Now, for the real problems... It started with the milling of the grain. We didn't have a clean bucket around so I suggested just grinding right into the mash tun.
Adding to the excitement, when doing the mash in we added 171F water to 25.63 pounds of 68F grain, which *should* have given us a 154F mash. Our digital thermometer said something closer to 160F. Not good. We dropped the temp with a bit of cold water, but I was afraid of dropping too far like the last time, so we just dropped it to 158F on the digital, and stopped.
I'm fairly certain we were able to mix the mash pretty well, but the tun was pretty well topped up, and the plastic spoon just wasn't up to the task. We grabbed a length of copper pipe, gave it a quick wash and mixed away. It's quite possible, of course, that we missed a dough ball somewhere down in there... unlikely, but I'm not going to discount it as a possibility.
The rest of the brew went according to plan, with plenty of hop goodness added in.

Our new 9% evaporation rate seemed to match reality, and the chilling went well. We wound up with 10.5 gallons in 2 fermenters. We pitched a 2 day old starter of Wyeast 1056 and oxygenated.

After toting the carboys downstairs, I took a gravity reading and was quite disappointed to read 1.059 when my original calculations had been for 1.073. I checked just now, and to get that OG we would have had to hit 85% efficiency, and I'm thinking I had it set to 75 or 80%, so I'll chalk that up to differences in the water needed portions of Promash and reality. I've set that correctly at this point, so that should take care of that issue for future runs.

Even though I was unhappy losing those points, the taste of the raw beer is pretty amazing. Some of the hops we used had been fridge bound for a while, so I think the loss of gravity will pair up with the loss of IBU to create a balanced beer.

The next day Ryan checked the temperature on the HLT at a boil, and the thermometer there was off by 4F, so it seems the digital was right. Next time (I keep saying that) we'll have a clean bucket, proper temps, and a more conservative efficiency setting. Perhaps we can finally have a worry free brew :)


The recipe for Not Quite Stupid:

%	Amount	Name	Origin	Potential	SRM
91.7	23.50 lbs.	Pale Malt(2-row)	Great Britain	1.038	3
2.9	0.75 lbs.	Crystal 80L		1.033	80
0.5	0.13 lbs.	Biscuit Malt	Great Britain	1.035	35
4.9	.25 lbs.	Wheat Malt	America	1.038	2

Amount	Name	Form	Alpha	IBU	Boil Time
0.50 oz.	Simcoe	Pellet	12.00	13.3	60 min
0.38 oz.	Warrior	Pellet	15.40	12.9	55 min
0.50 oz.	Simcoe	Pellet	12.00	12.4	50 min
0.75 oz.	Chinook	Pellet	12.00	17.8	45 min
0.50 oz.	Amarillo Gold	Pellet	8.40	5.8	35 min
0.50 oz.	Simcoe	Pellet	12.00	6.8	30 min
0.50 oz.	Amarillo Gold	Pellet	8.40	3.7	25 min
0.50 oz.	Simcoe	Pellet	12.00	3.5	15 min
0.50 oz.	Centennial	Pellet	9.60	2.1	10 min
0.50 oz.	Centennial	Pellet	9.60	1.8	5 min
0.50 oz.	Crystal	Pellet	3.70	0.0	0 min

WYeast 1056 Amercan Ale/Chico

First Brew!

So, on December 31st we finally tested out the new stuff. Since this was the first time we fired up the burners, we tested them out with a few gallons of water. We needed to fully flush the lines out anyway. Turns out that this was a good thing to do before we had it loaded up with a full load.


Apparently fire burns wood. Who knew? OK, we did, but we had hoped the fire would be directed up, and since we've used the burners on the deck before without issues it seemed the be the right thing to do. The heat shields must have done a really good job.

We drilled a hole in the bottom of the platforms in an attempt to get it to draw better, but it still got too hot. I was able to take a nice shot of the fire through the hole though.


Our temporary solution was to put some sheet aluminum under the burners. Before we brew the next time, we will cut some to fit.

Our recipe was a Guinness clone from BYO Magazine:

• 5 lbs 2 row
• 2.5 lbs flaked barley
• 1 lb roasted barley
• 2.4oz east kent goldings
• Wyeast 1084

90 minute boil, all hops go in at 60. This is a 5 gallon recipe which we doubled.

We had a couple of problems. The first was we mashed out with too much water which raised our temp to about 175 or so. I'm not sure how we measured wrong, but hopefully we will pay more attention next time. We then dumped some ice in to lower the temp, but didn't watch the temp (again!) and went too low. This was definately a "RDWHAHB" moment for me. Our next moment (well, Ryan's moment, I had to leave early to help Duane prep for his NYE party) was the low evaporation rate the larger kettle has (9% vs. 15%). We wound up with a little more wort than expected, lowering our SG by a few points.

All in all it was a good day, and most of the bugs we can work out on the next run.

--
Bill