Change Is Coming

And for once change is a good thing. I mentioned in a recent post that I was going to have some new gear coming into the fold. I will be building a new brew system. The system design comes from the wonderful work of Kal over at The Electric Brewery. I am following Kal's design almost exactly. My system will be designed to handle 50 amps instead of the 30 amps that Kal's initial design details.

You may have noticed my price per pint skyrocketing over the last couple weeks. That is because I started ordering parts for the system. The first parts arrived today. They are easily the second coolest part of the system. I present my new 20 gallon Blichmann Boilermakers! The decision to get the Blichmann kettles was difficult. I could get other kettles cheaper, but I decided to just build exactly what I wanted in the brew system.

I will be documenting my system build here on the blog. I am still waiting for some tooling and additional parts before I can really get started so updates on the system will be slow at first. While I wait I will just be staring at how shiny and cool my new kettles are.

24 Hours, 2 Brews

Following a pretty nasty snow/ice storm, I was finally able to get to my local homebrew shop to pick up some ingredients. Within 24 hours I had 2 beers in the fermenter. This was crucial because I am now down to 1 beer on tap, 2 beers carbonating, and nothing in the pipeline.

First up was the next reincarnation of my Guinea Pig IPA. Due to a computer crash and some mismanagement of paper copies I had no record of my previous recipe. So I had to recreate the recipe to the best of my ability then make the changes I thought could help the next version. Unfortunately the homebrew shop did not have the hops I wanted to use so I subbed the zythos (more on this hop in a future post) hop for both amarillo and simcoe. I pitched the yeast before I went to bed and got together what I would need for the brew in the morning.

The second beer I was making was my first attempt at Mike McDole's Janet's Brown Ale recipe. I had a couple friends over who wanted to see the brewing process. It's always nice to have someone else around to mill 14 pounds of grain. This was the first time I had trouble hitting my mash temps. First I was too low then made adjustments to be too high and finally got it close enough. I ended up being slightly low on my starting gravity for this beer but everything else went smoothly. The difference in gravity shouldn't make too much of an impact on the finished beer.

Both of these beers are now bubbling away in the basement closet. The IPA took a little longer than normal to get started. I will be very happy in a few weeks when these beers finish and I can put them on tap after what we have now is drained during our yearly Super Bowl party.

The Importance of Taking Measurements

The keg of Guinea Pig IPA poured its last pint tonight so I put Her Majesty's Sloppy Seconds ESB on tap. This was the beer made from the second runnings of the barleywine I brewed a couple months ago. It was an experiment to see how it would turn out. My first taste of the finished beer was a sweet beer, nothing like the ESB I was expecting. However, because I did not take good notes on this beer after getting it in the fermenter I don't know what the cause of the sweetness is. It could be that I didnt add enough hops or it didnt ferment to completion. The experiment now doesn't help because I was lazy.

Kegging Day

Ready to be cleaned!

Today was one of the less fun brewing days. I cleaned three kegs and filled two. On the bright side, this means that I have two more beers that will be ready to drink soon. I kegged the Vanilla Stout and the Pink Death Pale. The Vanilla Stout is a recipe that I have close to perfected. I am now dialing in the right amount of vanilla to add. The last iteration had a little too much due to some clumsiness and me spilling some extra vanilla extract into the keg. This time I added the intended amount and hopefully it will be what we are looking for.

The Pink Death Pale is an original recipe of mine. It is a pale ale made with a bit of rye. It is hopped with all Cascade hops. It needs some tweaking, but it definitely has potential. The name comes from the fact that I was doing a 2.5 gallon batch using my 10 gallon cooler mash tun. I was worried about temp loss with so much headspace and so I made an artificial top for the mash tun out of pink foam board insulation. I cut it to size, covered it in foil and set it on top of the mash. The name serves warning to anyone who drinks it that I may be killing them slowly with each pint (even though the foil kept the mash from touching the insulation).

New Toys

I've had a couple new brewery toys to play with for the last couple months. The first is a grain mill. I was having an issue getting a consistent grain crush from the various places I was shopping at to purchase my ingredients. After doing some research I decided to go with the Barley Crusher. It seemed to provide the most bang for my buck. With the addition of a 5 gallon bucket, the grain mill was ready to go. It offers the ability to crush the grain with a drill, but so far I have just been crushing it by hand. Turning the crank before brew day is a nice workout and gives me something to do while my strike water is heating.

The newest toy is a refractometer. I have only had this for one and a half batches so far and already I love it. Taking pre-fermentation gravity readings is now so fast and easy that I can't help but do them. It also helps me track my progress pre and post boil. I know whether or not I need to add some extract to help meet my target original gravity. I have also been taking readings post fermentation along with my hydrometer in order to test some of the refractometer correction equations that could allow me to take readings post fermentation.

Stay tuned for some big changes coming. I am about to have an onslaught of new toys!

Parti!

Well partigyle at least. My latest brew day encompassed 2 firsts. It was my first attempt at a barleywine and my first partigyle brew session. Partigyle brewing is when you take the first runnings of the mash to make a large beer and then use the second runnings of the mash to make a smaller beer. I made an ESB with the second runnings. The recipe I followed called for 28 pounds of grain in the mash tun. As you can see below, my system tops out at around 23 pounds of grain.

At capacity

Thankfully I was able to get beersmith up and running again for this brew. It was very helpful in making the adjustments to the recipe. Because my mash tun was not large enough to make the beers as called for, my partigyle brew actually used the first and half of the second runnings for the barleywine and the other half of the second runnings and the third runnings for the ESB. In order to give the ESB some additional character I steeped a pound of crystal malt while it was coming to a boil. One issue I ran into during brew day was a place to store all of the wort for the ESB while I was boiling the barleywine. I will need to get another big kettle.

A little ESB here, a little there...

Because I had to run even more water through the grains to get the amount I needed to boil it made the ESB a little watered down. I was able to do some calculations taking my pre-boil gravity into account and I added some dry malt extract to get the gravity to where I needed it. I managed to hit the expected original gravity exactly and it was definitely a highlight of the day.

Overall, I enjoyed doing the partigyle, but I definitely need some additional equipment to make it go a little smoother (i.e. another kettle). It was very fun to see these beers ferment like crazy after I added the yeast. The barleywine nearly bubbled through the air lock, but the krausen receded just in time. I have a long road ahead with the barleywine. It has a couple months of oak aging ahead of it, but I have a feeling the wait will definitely be worth it.

Tis the Season!

[Apparently I never posted this article. I found it on the my system. It still has the original time stamp so I figured it wouldn't hurt to get it up here.]

Time to brew that pumpkin beer... for Thanksgiving... Ok fine. So it's not the season, but it is a season and that calls for a special beer. This is the first time I have brewed with a non brewing ingredient. This beer called for about 3.5 pounds of pumpkin to be added to the mash. However, after talking with the fine folks at the homebrew store, I was persuaded to just add the pumpkin to the boil. This let me avoid a problem that plagues a lot of pumpkin mashes... a stuck sparge.

This brew went smoothly despite the fact that I didn't hit my numbers. The beer ended up a bit low on starting gravity. This was in part because I just kind of went for it with this recipe. The computer that I had Beersmith running on has died. So I am in the dark with my brewing software. For this recipe I tried to make the adjustments to my system without any software and I didn't do a very good job. Hopefully, it will turn out alright.