Well, just shy of three months here we are kegging up the Imperial Stout from the bourbon barrel. Kegging it was pretty simple, but I needed to bring out an autosiphon again. I don't remember the last time I used one.
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Alright folks, this update is a fun one.
On my bucket list of brewing has been to make a big beer. A group of guys I've brewed with on and off with over the years used to do regular homework assignments and one of these was to make a 10%+ beer. Well, this beer hits that mark. On top of that, I decided that it would be an excellent excuse to start a barrel aged beer. The beer is the clone of New Holland's Dragon's Milk out of the Book of Clone brews. We did a double brew day, which was a bit exhausting. All in all, it was a 12 hour day. I had the nut brown's yeast as the propagator for this beer's fermentation and pitched about a quart and a half of yeast. The beer got off to a good fermentation and was very aggressively bubbling away. The beer smells and tastes pretty good as just a stout. It is big and a bit hot on the tongue from the alcohol. Filling a barrel wasn't too hard. We sanitized a pump by running a starsan mix through it for a couple of minutes and then hooked it up to the conical and let pumped it out. We were a bit short on brew so I may brew a smaller 5-gallon batch of this and top off the barrel to reduce oxidation. Or I may just let it go since it won't be in the barrel that long. Who knows at this point. One note on a barrel stand. If you ever build one, I definitely like that I have it tall enough to rack into a keg, and that is on wheels. 15 gallons of beer + a 40lb barrel would not be possible to move and would make kegging a chore if it were on the ground. Wow! It has been a long time since I put a brewing update out in the world. A lot has happened since my last post. Two kids and a job change. Well, here's the update...
I have brewed quite a few beers. In 2018 I bought a conical, which has been great for yeast harvesting as well as temperature control. Last year I went on kind of a lager bender and used an aquarium chiller to keep the wort cool. Note on that, it died after a year so I wouldn't recommend going that route. They weren't built for it. My most recent brew was a nut brown that is really acting as a yeast propogator for a much bigger beer that I am brewing on labor day. It is similar to browns I've brewed before and I am betting it will turn out. I tried a split brew day with this batch and I really liked it. My process for it was to get up to strike temp, stir in the mash, go to bed, wake up and finish the brew day. It was insanely simple. If the beer turns out well, then I have my new method of a simple brew day. Saturday was a beautiful Wisconsin winter day. It was 11 degrees outside, wind blowing and just plain cold. I'm happy to say that I brewed without having to worry about the low temps and freezing propane tanks. The indoor brewery is really starting to click.
I set out to brew an IPA from my neighbor's hops that we harvested last fall. He grew a couple of nugget hop plants and we were able to harvest a couple pounds of hop cones off of the vines (that's dry weight). I settled in on using a fairly simple IPA recipe. 11lbs of 2 row, 12 oz. caramel 30 and 8oz of sugar. I heated up my strike water to 164.5 degrees and then began the 90 minute mash at 155. I struck a little high at 156 and let the temp settle down to 155. The mash ran pretty well and I collected 7 gallons into the boil kettle. I started my boil without a hop addition. The recipe I came up with was all later additions. My first hop addition was with 20 minutes left in the boil. I dumped in 2 oz of nuggets at 20, 5 and 0 minutes left in the boil. At the five minute mark I dropped in a Whirlfloc tablet and a couple teaspoons of yeast nutrient. Chilling went well and I was down to 65 degrees in about 5 minutes. The only gotcha moment was when I was collecting my wort for the fermenter. Lesson learned: whole hops suck up a lot of wort. I think I lost about a gallon to the 6oz of whole hops. Overall a good day and now my yeast monkeys are flying around the fermenter. I'm looking forward to putting 2 more oz of hops into the keg and having a nice IPA on tap. If things ferment out as they should, we'll have a nice 7% roughly 65 IBU IPA on tap! Electric brewing is fun for sooooo many reasons! First, the setup and take down are simplified now that everything stays in one place. Second, the control I have over mash temp and when the boil begins makes it more flexible. Lastly, I like not carrying heavy volumes of liquid as far. Ten feet across my basement beats the crap out of going up stairs from outside and then lugging the carboys downstairs to the basement.
Yesterday I brewed a chocolate porter. Hooking up the four hoses to the kettles and pumps was quickly done and I was ready to calculate my water needed for the days brew. Based on grain absorption, equipment loss and boil off I calculated that I needed 9.5 gallons of water. I filled up my boil kettle with water and started heating it to 158 degrees to reach my desired mash temperature of 153. I added two camden tablets to get rid of the chlorine. I mashed in at 152 and was quickly up to 153. The range of mash temps on the day were between 152.5 and 153.6. Mostly the mash hovered between 152.8 and 153.4. Today I did something different and used my kettles basket in addition to the grain bag. That was a great idea! My pick-up tube was not getting clogged trying to suck up the bag of grains. I mashed for 90 minutes, raised my temp to 170 to stop the conversion and then took my initial gravity reading. My gravity reading was 1.040. I was targeting 1.059, so i needed to collect 8 gallons of wort to hit my final gravity. I collected the wort and began boiling. Because I had more wort than would boil off in 60 minutes, I boiled for 20 minutes first and then started my 60 minutes of boiling for my hop schedule. Once the boil was underway it was simple to add in my hops, lactose and whirlfloc tablet. Chilling was a breeze with the counterflow chiller. I was able to get the brew down to temp in about 7 minutes. One thing I tried this time was getting my hosing low in the kettle for recirculating and kicking off a whirlpool. It was a great idea! The hops caked in the middle of the kettle and I put less debris in my fermenter than I have historically. It was a beautiful brew day! Recipe: 9lbs 8oz 2-row 8oz chocolate malt 8oz chocolate wheat malt 4oz Crystal 30 2oz black malt Tettnanger 1.5oz (60) Tettnanger 1oz (20) 8oz Lactose (10) I plan on kegging this one on top of about 8 ounces of cocoa nibs. This should be tasty and reminiscent of Bolder's Chocolate Shake Porter. Happy Brewing! Today was my first run on the new system. I decided to do a simple cream ale. The reasoning behind that was, if I really screw it up, I won't be out a whole lot. The recipe was pretty simple:
5lbs 2-row 1lb flaked corn 8oz flaked rice 0.5oz tettnanger (60) 1oz tettnanger (5) I started out by getting my water up to strike temperature. My plan was to mash at around 150, so I heated up my water to 154 and added the grain to the mash tun. I had a rough idea of water to start with - I ended up putting 9.5 gallons of water for striking. I knew I needed to keep at least 2 gallons in the boil kettle to be above the element. The rest of the liquid ideally would be in the mash tun giving the grains enough liquid to convert. One issue with the new setup I found out pretty quickly is that the bag I use for mashing likes to get sucked up into my pickup tube. This slows the wort movement between kettles to a crawl and caused me to almost dry fire the element a couple times during the mash. The consistency of the temperature of the mash worked out pretty well. I was floating between 149.5 and 150.5 most of the 90 minutes in the mash. I then transferred the wort over to the boil kettle. I ended up with 8.5 gallons of wort - more than I needed so I went for a 90 minute boil to get closer to a five gallon batch. The boil was fairly uneventful. The hop additions went smoothly and all went to plan. My new counterflow chiller is awesome. In about 10 minutes I got my kettle down to 72 and then filled up my carboys. It was slick and simple to do. I measured my gravity and got a 1.044 - 90+% efficiency. My plan is to let it ferment for a week, add a couple teaspoons of yeast nutrient and let it sit for a couple more days and keg. Hopefully we'll be ringing in the new year with this ready to go! Happy brewing! Wow, what an end of year it has been! Over the past couple of weeks I've been working hard at remodeling a room in my basement to be an all electric brewery. This project began really about a year ago when I began getting fed up with using propane and being at mercy to the outside elements.
I started by using a lot of inspiration from the electric brewery. He has some really easy to follow documentation that I used to modify the system to meet my needs. I have two PIDs on the box. One controls the element, the other is just for temperature monitoring out of the mash tun. I'm hoping this will let me maintain a nice mash temp throughout and easily go up to a boil. The next true test will be doing a brew day. I have one (or two!) slotted up so I'll have beer in kegs before the new year's eve. Life is good! Happy brewing Well, it has been a while since I brewed last (since November 2014...). I finally made time this past weekend to do a brew-day and boy was it fun! I've been unhappy with a lot of the beers that I've been making ever since we moved to our current house. The flavor was off and I was trying to dig into why. Well, the first thing that a good brewing friend of mine suggested was that the water was off. This brew was all about testing to see if this is the problem.
For the brew, my recipe was: 15 lbs of 2 row 2 lbs of caramunich II Hops were: 2 oz of Lemon Drop (4.4 AA) at first wort 2 oz of Lemon Drop (4.4 AA) for last 2 minutes 2 oz of Lemon Drop (4.4 AA) at flame out To change the water of the brew I've done two things. The first is a major thing. We replaced our water softer. The previous one had been built in 1989 (26 years ago). The second thing that I did was use a few Camden tablets to remove any chlorine. The day went well and the tasting of the beer was eye opening! There was just a clean taste of beer. No metallic twinge, no stale flavor. I'm hoping that after the ferment the beer tastes as good on tap. If it does, I know exactly how to do brew days going forward! Best of brewing! Charles Well, if I haven't mentioned this before I really should. My wife is awesome. She let me get a kegging setup for the basement! Not only did she let me get the kegging setup, but she let me get the one with four kegs! This is going to be a great start to a year of brewing. I chose to go the route of using a chest freezer as my cooling method of choice. To do this, you need to purchase, or build, a temperature controller. I decided to build because I find DIY projects fun to do and it also was the more cost effective route. The DIY version I went with has been done by many and can be found by searching for DIY Aquarium temperature control unit. Youtube has plenty of good videos out there for it. The one I found particularly helpful can be found here. The guy goes into great detail and I could follow along with him in real time when it came to the wiring. Mine ended up looking like the photo on the right! After finishing building the temperature controller, the gas lines and kegging only took about an hour. This is awesome compared to the 6-8 hours I would have spent sanitizing and bottling the 10 gallons of brew. Kegging is a pretty simple process. The only issue I had were the Corny keg lids are finicky (at least mine were). The trick to getting them on right is by using some soapy water (or star san) and checking for bubbles. I can't wait till Monday when I get to try my first homebrew pour out of a keg! Today was an early start with moving the Saison out of the primary and onto the secondary. I would have liked to go into bottles, but it was not time yet. The gravity of the Saison was still high at 1.020. My goal for it is to have it move down to 1.016. Hopefully with the heat going into the 90s this week it will push the gravity a little lower. Why move the beer over? Well, I wanted to wash the yeast and clear up the carboys to brew my Nut Brown ale. Washing yeast is actually really easy. The day before I boiled a pot with 3 pint jars and a pyrex bowl. I put the jars in the fridge over night and let them cool down while being sanitized. When you have racked the beer off of the yeast, you are of course left with the yeast cake. I dumped the sanitized water from the jars and pyrex into the carboy and shook it around to get the yeast back into suspension. I then used my auto-siphon to rack the yeast over to the mason jars. My process I adapted from a post on Homebrewtalk.com about yeast washing - it worked out great! After the yeast washing it was a pretty straightforward to brew my nut brown. I've done this one before so it was a pretty routine brew day. Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll be bottling a couple delicious brews! In fact, the fermenting started without a hitch!
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AuthorHi! I'm Charles. I live in Wisconsin and by living in this great state I have managed to get an interest in brewing beer. This is my adventure that I will share with any willing folk. Archives
September 2022
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