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