Hey Everybody!
Brew Day, friends! That’s right! For the first time on the BrewChatter system, we did 10 gallons! 34 pounds of grain, 22 gallons of water and a full pound of hops!! Needless to say, it was a big brew day!
As you know, our mash tun is a 10 gallon Igloo beverage cooler, which was absolutely not sufficient to mash for a 10 gallon batch at 1.3:1 water to grist ratio. Our mash water was 11 gallons with 34 pounds of grain…yeah. So we decided to get creative, the funnest part of brewing! We took our converted half barrel keg, swapped the false bottom from the cooler, switched around a few fittings, and BOOM! A shiny new 15.5 gallon mash tun! Oh, we filled it, too! We almost overflowed! By the time we had 25 pounds in, I was sure we weren’t going to make it! At 34, it was downward strokes only!!
Surprisingly enough, our chopped up keg held temp almost as well as the beverage cooler! We expected a drop from 152 to 147 at least over the course of the mash, but barely a degree was lost. Our conversion was killer, and we just used our beverage cooler as a lauter tun. Talk about a great switcheroo!
Mashing in a 15.5 vessel and trying to boil in a 15 gallon vessel is…well, it’s fun! Yet again, we filled all the way to the top! By that I mean about two inches from the rim!! Waiting for the hot break with my hand on the burner control was like waiting for a pregnancy test to come back!! As we came up on our hot break, I slowly kept turning down the burner until it got just barely out of control. Luckily, we never had to kill the heat, and our hot break came with a very minimal amount of boil over-enough to where it never even hit the floor!
While that bad boy boiled, we got to bottling. Apparently, if you just keg and drink all the time, bottling is something that you COMPLETELY forget how to do. HAHAHAHA! So we go to bottle, using our brilliant method of pushing the beer into the bottles from a keg with CO2, and I realize that I didn’t make any primer! Ok, easy fix. Happened to have some Belgian Candi Sugar, and drop one in each bottle. Maybe not the most sanitary idea, but effective, nonetheless. At least we remembered to clean the bottles! Then, instead of our brilliant method, we rack into a bucket and bottle off the spigot. Strike two! On top of all of that, my small 5# CO2 tank that is used for small, misc jobs around the brewery, even though it has just been filled, is empty. EMPTY! So, all our transfers are in open air, no CO2 was used in the bottling of this product. Strike 3! Hopefully, with a 6.9% abv and way too many hops for 5 gallons, it won’t have anything to horrible. I’m not super optimistic, but we’ll see!!
Bottling complete, we all return to the boil, which is almost done. Luckily it’s cold outside, because our cooling method is really only set up for five gallons as well, something that will have to be remedied soon! This being said, it still only took a little over an hour to get to temp, which was better than expected! We pull it, pour it, rack it and cap it! Five gallons will be fermented by WLP008, East Coast Ale yeast, and the other using our WLP 001 Cal Ale yeast cake from the Black Virgin.
Both carboys are currently in the fridge now, happily bubbling away at 67 degrees. The Cal Ale yeast cake is so happy, in fact, that it’s exploded all over the inside of the fridge, the 008 not too far behind!!
I’d like to make a quick note of our hops in this brew. We used a full pound of hops throughout the brew, all of which were Magnum, Citra and Cascade. Citra is a newer hop, and very new for us. If y0u haven’t brewed with it yet, you have to try this hop! Killer aroma and flavor. If I hadn’t been checked, we’d have used the whole pound of just Citra!!!
We’ll keep you posted on how that works out!! In the meantime, we’d love to hear about YOUR brew days, how many gallons you do and how you do them! What do you brew and why?
