Brush Valley Brewer

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.

Going to brew commemoration ale today (3/21)…

Ground the grains last night (3/20).

10:04 Strike water is hot. Started targeting 5½ gallons. Forgot to close valve on kettle. Guessed a quart lost. Added more. Ended up reading 6 gallons on sight glass.

10:08 Mashing. Mash temperature 158 °F. Added ½ g. 67 °F (tap) water. Settled at 152 °F. Mash volume just under 8 gallons.

10:48 Heating sparge water.

11:08 Vorlauf twice. ½-gallon Each. Temp 147 °F.

11:13 Lautering. Gravity of first runnings is 18.3 Brix. 1.073 SG.

11:18 First runnings collected. Sight glass says 4½ gallons.

11:24 Added sparge water. About 3¼ gallons.

11:34 Sparging. Starting with two ½-gallon vorlauf. Then collecting 3 gallons.

11:43 Sparge complete. Gravity of second runnings is 7.4 Brix. 1.029 SG. Total collected volume 7¼ gallons by sight glass. Boil gravity 13.7 Brix. 1.054 SG. Nailed it!!!

11:45 Heating to boil.

12:23 209 °F but rolling. I’m calling it a boil. Starting 90 min timer.

12:27 Boil over. Just barely. Don’t think it will effect anything.

12:36 Dumped spent grain on compost pile and rinsed MLT.

12:56 Bittering hops added.

1:41 Flavor hops added. Put immersion chiller in kettle to sanitize.

1:51 First aroma hop added.

1:55 Second aroma hop added.

1:56 Cooling.

2:20 Chilled. Original gravity 17 Brix. 1.068. Nailed it!!! Final volume 5⅓ gallons by sight glass. Draining to fermenter.

2:45 Aerating.

2:50 Pitching.

3:00 In fermentation chamber at 68 °F.

4:08 Everything cleaned and put away.

Next morning (3/22) I remembered to put sanitizer in the air lock. There is activity but it’s pretty weak.

So. Now that I have a chance to think I realize that I didn’t do some things. Nothing tragic, but if I’m taking notes i should have.

I tasted the grains as I was grinding them but I didn’t write my observations down. I remember the two-row was delicious and the dark kilned caramel was not but nothing in between and I have no record of my observations.

The other thing I didn’t do was taste the wort. Every time I took a gravity reading I should have tastes the wort. First and second runnings. Pre- and post boil. It might be interesting to taste the mash. It would also be good to taste the beer before carbonation.

Tuesday evening (3/23) I noticed that the beer temperature was 72 °F. The ambient temperature had warmed up during the day and wasn’t providing enough cooling capability. Fortunately the forecast for the evening was to be quite cold. I cracked a window and opened the panels on the fermentation box. After a few hours the temperature was down to 69 °F and was 66 °F by morning (that’s actually a bit low for what I had in mind).

There was also an issue with the Wyeast smack pack. It was partially inflated and I couldn’t get enough pressure on the nutrient pack to break it. When I pitched, a lot of the yeast appeared to be stuck in the package. I managed to break the nutrient pack once the smack pack was open, thinking that I could use it to rinse the yeast out of the outer pack with it. However, I managed to spray it all over the ceiling while breaking it open. So I think this batch is pretty severely underpitched. That and the temperature may result in a fairly strained yeast culture which may affect the beer flavor.

The following Saturday (3/27) I swirled the carboy and started raising the temperature targeting 70 °F for a diacetyl rest.

The following Monday (3/29) I added the dry hops. Gravity read 8.4 Brix (uncorrected) or 1.012 final gravity. Predicted final gravity was 1.016, so I’m guessing my wort was a little more fermentable than expected. That will give me an ABV of 7.5% when I expected 6.9%.

That coming Thursday (4/1) and Friday (4/2), the hops had begun to sink and settle to the bottom of the carboy. I swirled the beer in the carboy to re-suspend some of it and get as much out of them as I could.

Saturday (4/3) I bottled. I went with 2.2 volumes of CO₂. The beer finished fermenting at 70 °F. My calculations showed that I needed 0.84 ounces per gallon. I estimated that I had five gallons in the carboy, so that made 4.2 ounces total. I used 2 cups of water. I ended up with 12, 22-ounce bottles and 24, 12-ounce bottles (552 ounces, or 4.3125 gallons). That gave me 0.97 ounces per gallon, which should result in something under 2.7 volumes of CO₂, which is pretty high.

Here it is, the Tuesday after bottling (4/6). I had noticed the beer did not clear very well. I figured there was a lot of suspended yeast that would settle in bottle conditioning. I wondered if it was the amount of dry hops I had added leaving a haze of resins. Then today I was walking across campus while listening to a brewing podcast. They started talking about clarifiers. Then I remembered. I did not use one. I had not added it to my recipe and come brew day I forgot. I would normally use Irish moss or Whirlfloc. I do not know why I missed it this time. It will still be beer though.

It’s Wednesday (4/7). I found some leftover grains from the brew. I don’t have everything, but it’s worth tasting and recording what I do have.

The two-row is terrific. I would eat this as a snack or with breakfast. I had some trepidation when I first tasted my brewing grains. My wife rolls her own (our) oatmeal and every once in a while an oat sneaks through that still has the hull intact. Let me tell you, those things are inedible. GET THIS THING OUT OF MY MOUTH. NOW! For some reason, malted grains are not like that. I’ll gladly eat their husks. Anyway, I digress. The two-row is lightly flavorful. Unsurprisingly a bit like the insides of malted milk balls. The Munich malt has a very similar flavor, but ever-so-slightly sweeter. The Caramel 120L has a slightly burnt taste to it. Like the un-popped popcorn hulls in the bottom of the bowl that you eat anyway.

I mentioned that I hadn’t added any clarifier. The other thing I noticed, or rather that I had not noticed, that I had expected to notice was hot break and cold break. I have heard that one of the differences between extract and all grain is the presence of hot break and cold break. I have heard it described as being like egg drop soup. Well, I did not notice any of that. It seemed much like the extract brews I have made.