Brewer’s log, Brew Date – 30-12-09 1133
So I’ve already made my 1st mistake with this one and I just started boiling. But I’m jumping ahead. Let’s start at the beginning. I got up at about 7:05 to start the brew day. Got my medium and small pots out and started the water to boiling in each, the medium pot on my propane burner and the small pot on the stove. While the water was coming to a boil, I got the rest of my equipment out and set up.
The mash in my converted cooler mash tun.
I mashed in with 162F water to precisely hit my desired mash in temperature of 149F; and it worked, hit 149F on the nose. stirred the mash every 15 minutes and topped off with a few ounces of boiling water to maintain 149F. Total mash time was a little over an hour. I ran through the vorlauf
Runnings cleared up in about 1 quart of vorlauf.
and it cleared up in less than 2 quarts. Open the valve on my cooler mash tun all the way and let that baby drain fast, like Denny says. I poured in the next bath of water at about 173F to mash out at 168F. remember the grains are still pretty hot so it doesn’t take much of an increase in temperature to get to mash out. I let that sit for about 10 minutes, and drained fast again. I collect about 6.8 gallons, so I added a pitcher of hot water to the cooler and ran that through to get to the 7 gallons I was shooting for. I guess this means me system holds more water than I calculated for. I figured that the grain and the tun dead space would hold about 0.125 gallons per lb of grain, but it looks like I ma be up around 0.135 gal/lb.
Next comes the boil. The wort came up to a boil rather quickly, about 15-20 minutes. Here where the first mistake comes in. I had all my hop additions laid out
The boil additions - Bittering, flavor and aroma hops, yeast nutrients, whirlfloc and dextrose.
and labeled using the bags they were packed in. But, I guess that wasn’t good enough. I grabbed my 1st addition and went outside. I threw in two muslin bags at 75 minutes like my recipe says, only they were my flame out Centennial hops (2 ounces) and not my 1.6 ounces of Nugget bittering hops!. So when i realized this I put the Nuggets back in the freezer and grabbed two more ounces of Centennial hops. Now it is an all Centennial IPA. Not a terrible thing, but I was trying to get rid of the Nuggets. Now the beer will have about 111 IBUs. It is going to be really bitter. RDWHAHB
The rest of the brew day went fairly smooth and was one of my most relaxed yet. I think this was due to the fact that I orgainized all my brew supplies on a new shelf unit in the laundry room.
The only other hiccup was when I encountered frozen water lines outside and couldn’t chill there. I took the brew pot down to the laundry room and chilled it using the water from the laundry tub down to 80F. I got it the rest of the way down to 68F using a cooler full of ice water and a small pond pump hooked up to my immersion chiller. I then transfered to the fermenter, aerated and pitched 1 sachet of rehydrated Safale US-05 dry brewer’s yeast.
