It’s another great day to brew. Today (4/11) I’m doing the BYO Stone IPA clone.
9:38 Finished mash/lauter/sparge calculations.
9:42 Yeast smacked.
10:30 Brewery set up. Heating strike water. Weighing grains.
10:49 Grains crushed.
10:56 Filling MLT with 160 °F strike water.
10:59 Mashing at 152 °F.
Note: Beiss Caramel 10L is very hard (crunchy) with a grainy flavor and very slight sweetness. Rahr 2-row has a much earthier flavor and is not as hard.
11:36 There’s a mocking bird running through her repertoire in a nearby oak tree. Sunny skies with a temperature of 61 °F.
11:44 Heating sparge water.
12:00 Vorlauff.
12:05 First runnings 19 Brix/1.076 SG.
Note: First runnings are DELICIOUS! Very sweet. Nice light color. The yeasties should be very happy.
12:10 Adding sparge water
12:15 Vorlauff.
12:18 Sparging. Gravity of second runnings 9 Brix/1.035 SG.
Note: Second runnings not as sweet as first. Subtle earthy flavor.
12:22 Combined wort 12.4 Brix/1.049 SG (BG). Expected 1.050. Sight glass says about 7⅜ gallons, but the kettle is leaning back a bit because the ground under the camp stove is uneven so I’m going to call it 7½ gallons, which was the target.
Note: About the level of sweetness of hot cocao.
12:26 Heating to boil.
12:34 Dumped spent grain on compost pile.
12:54 Measured out boil hops.
Note: Drinking a Stone IPA while brewing a Stone IPA clone. How fitting. Thank you, Gretchen, for thinking of it and joining me.
1:02 Boiling. I can see the hot break this time. It does look like egg drop soup. I still have no idea why I could not see it last time. Adding bittering hops.
2:14 Placed chiller in kettle to sanitize.
2:19 Adding flavor/aroma hops and whirlfloc tablet.
2:28 Sanitize fermenter.
2:34 Flame out. Chilling.
2:56 Chilled to 68 °F. Removing chiller, whirlpooling, and cover.
3:06 15.2 Brix/1.060 SG (OG). Expected 1.063 (1.065).
3:12 Draining to fermenter.
3:38 Aerating.
3:41 Pitched. Fermenting at 66 °F.
4:25 Everything put away.
Update: It is Monday (4/12) and when I went to see how my beer was doing, I noticed the thermostat for the fermentation chamber heater was on. It was set for 66 °F, but it was reading 60°F, so I investigated further. Turns out I did remember to put the temperature probe into the thermowell in the carboy, but I forgot to wrap the fermwrap heater around it. It was desperately trying to heat the carboy, but it did not have much of a chance since it was a few feet away. Easy enough to fix, but my streak of messing something up every batch is still unbroken. They say that colder fermentation can be cleaner, so I do not think this will be a problem.
Update: It is the next Monday (4/19) and I just added the dry hops.
Update: It is the next Sunday (4/25) and I’m bottling. The gravity measures 7.6 Brix/1.011 FG. Expected 1.019. Wow. 80.9% ADF. 6.5% ABV. I have to assume that my mash lost temperature (or my thermometer reads high) and my wort was much more fermentable than I expected. The beer had been fermenting at 64 °F. I got 51½ bottles (618 oz or 4.8 gallons). I used 3 oz of corn sugar. I should end up with about 2.2 volumes of CO₂.