Most Accurate Brew Day Yet!

It's not safe yet to start calling today's brew day a success, that'll take at least a week, maybe two before I can say that, and even then I can't be sure the beer is a success! However... what I can safely say is that today was the most technically accurate and tight brewday yet. Short of some minor temperature issues, and forgetting to close a valve, NOTHING went wrong!!

For starters, timing today was just about perfect. Here's how the day broke down:
1:00 - Start gathering equipment and heating water for mash
1:50 - Mash In
2:48 - Mash Out
3:00 - Start Sparge
3:40 - Finish Sparge
4:00 - Boil
4:10 - Hot Break
5:15 - Chill
5:30 - Pitch & Seal

Three hours and 40 minute from Mash In to Pitch! That's pretty darned good! Now it took me a while to get cleaned up... but it always does, I'm normally lazy by that point.

My mash started a little low, around 145°F. I was hoping to get 154°F or so, so I added almost 2 quarts of boiling water, and got it to 150°F. Good enough... I was going to run out of sparge water if I used any more. Also, my mashout didn't seem to raise the temp of the mash at all, and I can't figure that out. I thought the mash-out water was above 180°F, so it should've raised the temp at least a little bit! I'm not sure what happened there... but I'm not too worried about it. My sparge water was hot enough and the sparge went great.

Which brings me to the absolute best part of the brewday:

I HIT MY GRAVITY AND VOLUME!!!

Ok, to be honest, I overshot my gravity based upon my efficiency in the past, and hit my volume within about 1/16 of a gallon. But this is a pretty serious win for me, as this is the very first time I have hit 75% efficiency, which is basically the sweet spot that brewers shoot for.

I was starting to get a little frustrated by the fact that I was constantly undershooting my gravity. On the last batch, Van Den Heuv Ale, my mash Ph had been right on, and the sparge had gone very well as far as I could tell; there were no areas of sweet grain left in the grainbed, it was all very well rinsed. Ph and sparge are the two variables, not including temperature (which has never been the issue), that I have control over on brew day that will affect my efficiency. The other variable (which unfortunately is NOT easily correctable on brew day) is the crush of the grain; the more crushed it is the more sugar you will be able to extract. However, if the grain is over-crushed you can end up with basically a porridge that is impossible to sparge. Fortunately this "porridge" affect can be overcome by adding rice hulls to the mash to make it more porous. So this time around I had Brett at the Red Salamander double-crush my grain and give me some rice hulls. The end result is that I ended with around 13.5-14° Plato, at least a full degree higher than Beersmith said I should get! Awesome. And I managed to collect just under 5-gallons of wort at that gravity, so I'm feeling pretty good. Needless to say I am going to pay special attention to the crush of my grist in the future.

My only concern (besides the ever-lingering concern that I will get another infected batch...) is that the beer may be more hoppy than I would like... but this should be exactly as bitter as the first River Grand Brown Ale was, so if it's too bitter I just need to make it less bitter next time =)

I used my bottling bucket for a primary today because I am going to need my "primary" bucket for my secondary fermentation since it's such a PITA to get fruit in and out of a carboy. Unfortunately I forgot to close the valve at the bottom of the bottling bucket until after I had poured the wort in. I got it closed very quick... but I'm willing to bet that I would have had just a little over 5 gallons of wort if I had had the valve closed in the first place.

Anyway, brew day went well, and in honor of the eventual berry goodness that this beer should bring, I am currently drinking the original incarnation of Mount Pleasant Brewing Company's Coal Stoker's Blackberry Ale: 3-parts Raspberry Wheat, 1-part Steam Engine Stout. Subconsciously, this beer is probably the motivation for Choco-Berry Brown in the first place!

Bottled a butter bomb

So I bottled up Van Den Heuv Ale yesterday. While I don't think the beer got infected, I'm not sure it's going to turn out ok... it was laden with diacetyl. Diacetyl is a normal by-product of yeast, but one that the yeast should re-absorb on their own. It is likely that I racked the beer to secondary too soon, resulting in the remaining yeast being unable to re-absorb the remaining diacetyl. The problems is... diacetly can also be a side affect of a Pediococcu or Lactobacillus infection. So it's entirely possible that this beer did get infected... though I have a tendency to doubt that, mainly because all of my previous infections have been very obvious in primary and resulted in very vinegary/sour flavors. At least if this was an infection, it's a different one! On the off-chance that this is infected though, I need to be very careful with the bottles, they could be "bottle-bombs" waiting to go off! I really should put them in a plastic tub...

I did ask for some advice regarding whether there is anything I can do to reduce or eliminate the diacetyl on brewboard.com. It seems that if I keep the bottles in the 70°F range the yeast should be able to re-absorb some of the diacetyl while they eat up the priming sugar and carbonate, assuming the yeast is still healthy... which brings me to another point...

While I was at the Red Salamander the other day I was asking Karl how much sugar exactly to use, since it's been quite a while since I've bottled a beer. He said 5oz is the magic number for 5 gallons of beer. So I asked him, since I only had 4.5 gallons of beer, tops, should I use 4.5oz? He suggested that instead of reducing the amount of sugar, I should increase the amount of water I boil the sugar in to increase the total volume of beer... not a bad idea I thought! Well now I'm not so sure... I siphoned my beer into the bottling bucket after pouring my 3 or so quarts of boiling sugar water into the bottling bucket. Well obviously the beer was much cooler than the boiling water, and I'm afraid I may have killed off some of my yeast! I mean there were still wisps of steam coming off of the top of the beer after it had all siphoned in... By the math, my beer should have been a little less than 80°F when it was all mixed, but I'm a little worried. Oh well, not much I can do now but wait!

Post Brewday

Brewday went pretty smooth. Besides my normal PH mishaps, and once again coming short of five gallons, everything else went well.

One thing I learned today is that a 9 gallon kettle finally gives me enough room to boil enough wort to end up with 5 gallons. I've only ended up with around 4 gallons today, because I was using the same amount of water as I would have used for my 7.5 gallon kettle. I'll need to be using a minimum of 8 gallons total in the future, more if the grainbill is big. I need to end up with 6-6.5 gallons in the pot before I boil.

The 90 minute mash... may have ended up closer to 120 minutes. Oh well, I do like my brews dry... there were a couple of times that I forgot to reset the timer after stirring, and I think i forgot to mark down one stir. I was supposed to stir every 15 minutes, 5 times. I think I stirred more like every 20 on average, 6 times.

Pre-boil gravity was 1.036 at 100F, which should be about 1.041 or so at 70F. I think that might be right on... if I had harvested 6.4 gallons of wort. Since I only got 5.3 or so, my gravity was low, again. Even with that long ass mash... I gotta ask the brewclub about some ways to increase efficiency. Maybe a better mash tun for fly sparges.

I'm actually chilling it right now. It's take a ridiculous amount of time, 42 minutes so far, and it's at 76F or so. I want it to be 65-70 when I pitch, the closer to 65 the better. I'll let it go a little while longer.

The color on this seems right, and the taste pre-boil was good. I'm anxious to taste this as it's my first brew with the Glacier hops! Besides a porter I made, and there was little hop flavor or aroma in that, this'll show me a bit about Glacier!

Ok, I'm going to go pull the chiller, pour my wort in the primary and pitch my yeast...

Ok wow, 3.5 gallons. That's nearly 2 gallons of boil-off! This new kettle does havea bigger surface area, so I suppose that's what I'll have to work around. So I'll need 7+ gallons pre-boil to end up with 5 gallons of beer. If I had more jugs of water around, I could've used them, but I don't like topping off fermenters, I swear it's lead me to infections problems before.

The beer is a bit darker than I was shooting for, thanks to the boil-off, and may be a bit sweeter and more bitter than I was shooting for. Now I'm questioning whether I will lager it, as it's right in line to be an English Pale Ale, and a somewhat strong one at that, possible 6.5% or so. It's too late to make it more bitter, which is what I would really like, but I could dry-hop it and give it more hop flavor, but then I would loose more beer... Oh damn, it'll just be a strong Pale Mild or something. With German yeast... I guess I don't care what style it is as long as it tastes good!

So now I have to decide if I want to brew a DunkelWeizen next, or go for Colin's Colsch again with the right amount of water. Actually, the next brew may be an IPA, if I can get it done in time for the August Red Ledge Brewers Club meeting!

EASY with the GD Acid!

Okay, I thought I learned my lesson once... I thought I knew to be careful and go easy with the Phosphoric Acid if I'm going to use that to get my water PH correct.

Even better, I should correct the Mash PH, not the water.

But no! I once again WAY over compensated. Stupid... I had water that was so acidic it could probably have eaten my skin off! Okay, in all honesty it was nowhere near that... but I did go a bit overboard.

My Mash is almost done, it did correct itself, so I'll be in good shape.

Colin's Colsch

So I've been really digging some of the lighter-weight beers recently, such as Milds, Dark Milds, Altbiers, Koelsch, Weizen, and DunkelWeizen especially. Apparently a very Continental taste for styles as well...

So I decided that my next brew needed to be one of these styles. I think I might do Dunkelweizen next, but for next weekend, I decided to start out with the malt bill and brewing style of a Koelsch and work it into my own Summer Ale, for hopefully quick maturation and clean refreshing drinking.

Kolsch is a pale colored and very crisp, clean ale with German origin (Cologne), often made using only pale malts and Noble Hops. It was an answer the Pilsen's... Pilseners if my beer history serves me right, and is made with ale yeast but is actually lagered (cold-conditioned, 32 degrees or so) for a short time.

I really enjoy a Kolsch on a hot day, and I prefer it over a true pale Lager (made with lager yeast) as I often pick up on some sulfur in the pale lagers. But I wanted to mimic a Kolsch pretty closely, at first. So I found what I think is a nice little gem on homebrewtalk.com in the form of an email from a Kolsch Brewmaster at the Brauerei Früh Am Dom describing the basic method (here). It's not an exact breakdown, recipe, mash schedules etc, but in this case I think it's pretty easy to fill in the blanks. After seeing that thread though, decided that I would take as much of the Kolsch process and combine it with some of my fav ingredients, include some honey (I think a Summer Ale with honey sounds good, we'll see!).

So this is how it's going to go:

-Mash for high fermentability, 150F or even a slight bit below for 90 minutes
-I don't have super-soft water like Koln or Pilsen, but I can compensate with some acid to at least get the ph right, but use my normal water, which seems to work well
-Recipe is SIMPLE:
-7lbs Maris Otter Pale Malt
-2oz Glacier Hops, 30 min
-3lbs Honey, added at Flameout
-Safale K-97 (German ale) or my good buddy US-05 (if the k-97 doesn't show up in time)
-Primary for at least 7 days (Honey is supposed to take a longer time to ferment)
-Lager two weeks (secondary at 32F)
-Keg her up and she should be good to go! (Is it a female beer because it's a Blonde Ale?)

So this should hit the keg on July 19, in time for HOT summer days!

And a note to names and spelling... I haven't been consistent through this post, and obvioulsy I've hacked the name of the beer Colin's Colsch. Part of this is that I don't know offhand how to type the Umlaut, so if I want to spell Kölsch that way I have to paste it in... and I've seen it spelled Koelsch, and Kolsch in different places. But the beer name is a play on that, and a tip to the Koln/Cologne name for the city where the only true Kölsch's are brewed.

River Rat Rye summary

Brewday went pretty well. I hit my temperatures pretty much right on, 147-150 for the mash, and sparged about 165. Efficiency may have been a bit low (it sucked actually), the wort weighed in at I think about 1.032, I forgot to write it down apparently. That thickened up to 1.046 in the boil, so I could get 4.5% abv or so. PH was still a bit of a problem, it was high all around. I tried correcting the sparge, this time measuring quarter teaspoons into a pint of water and adding one cup of that at a time. I added 3/4 of a teaspoon and it was still high. I had been told on some forums that I probably just shouldn't get too worried about ph, so I just went ahead and sparged, but now I'm wondering if ph has something to do with my lack of efficiency.

I did have one "incident" where I accidentally pushed the rubber stopper that holds the steel mesh and copper pipe into my mash tun. I had about 1 gallon of 120 degree water and 1/2lb of rice hulls in there, so besides making a wet mess, there wasn't too much loss and it wasn't even sticky. I turned the mas tun so the drain side was away from me and all was fine.

This time, I went with my conceptual "compacted" brewday, where I waited to do things like get the mash tun clean until after I started heating my strike water, or waiting to make my sanitizer and sanitize my fermenter until the last 10 minutes of boil, etc. While this got me from start to yeast pitching in 4 hours, this was not such a good idea. I set up closer to the sink this time, which was handy, but it prevented me from being able to clean things as easily, and at some times I was somewhat rushed, and I couldn't watch my boil well enough, which resulted in a boilover. Next time it'll be back to having everything clean before I start, if not necessarily sanitized.

I started about 12:30, after picking up 10 gallons (again, actually the Absopure gallon + 8oz jugs) of water, and exchanging my propane tank. The mash got underway about 1:30, and I was on the burner at 2:50, boiling by 3:02, and had hot break at 3:05. I pulled it from the burner at 4:10 and pitched my yeast 20 minutes later. All in all everything worked great.

My biggest problem today were the hops and the volume. The whole leaf hops are a bit troublesome to deal with as they soak up a lot of wort (which exacerbated the volume issue) and are hard to keep out of the fermenter, unless you rack your wort into the fermenter, and I really prefer to pour mine, I think it's much easier. I don't think I took enough of my sparge water, but that's kind of a catch 22 because my gravity might have been even lower if I had taken more. I'm going to skip dry-hops on this batch because I don't want to lose any more beer to absorption.

I need to find out what to do about my efficiency. I know batch sparges are not efficient, but they should be more efficient than what I'm getting. I might need to start showing up at the Red Ledge Brewer's club meetings and ask for some input. There's tons of resources online, but I think I want to talk to some people who have experience in person. Perhaps I'll ask the person with the strongest beer

River Grand Brown Ale

Well it's not much of a name, but it's a start. I brewed River Grand Brown Ale on March 2, 2008. According to my boss' personal weather station (which is less than half a mile away) it was a little over 40 degrees when I started, and didn't get much cooler for the remainder of the brew day. That's why I picked yesterday, it was a weekend with relatively warm temps. But on to the real stuff, I'll start with the recipe:

River Grand Brown Ale

Grains:
8.5lbs Maris Otter
.5lbs Crystal 40l
.5lbs Victory
.5lbs Chocolate Malt

Hops:
2oz Sterling 5.3% aa FWH

Yeast:
White Labs California Ale WLP001
-then-
Fermentis US-05


The grains are in the paper bag, pre-ground from The Red Salamander. I've got my sanitizer (Iodophor) and my Phosphoric Acid for regulating ph and my test strips for measuring it in this picture as well. Today's brew beer is Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter.

BeerSmith says this recipe should fall right into the American Brown Ale (ABA) category nicely. Original gravity should be right around 1.056, color of about 20.8 SRM, and 39 IBU. I've got the right yeast for an ABA... but my hopping is not going to be typical ABA. This style should have "Moderate to high bitterness and hop aroma from American hops" (according to the BJCP Style Guidelines). I'm using American Hops, but Sterling are apparently more like the Czech Saaz than the typical Citrus-C American Hops. And, I'm only adding hops as First Wort Hops which will apparently yield a more mild bitterness and aroma than if I had added most of my hops at the beginning of the boil for bitterness and some at the end for aroma. All in all, I'm hoping for a dry-ish (to very dry) toast/chocolately brown ale that is easily drinkable with a pleasant but almost subdued hop character.

I'm going to go through the whole process real slowly on this first brewday log, for my own thorough records. After this batch, everything is else just minor tweaks on this process, so the logs will be much shorter.

I started cleaning my equipment up at around 2:30pm. This ended up being way too late to start a brewday. It took me nearly an hour to clean my equipment, partially because most of it hadn't been used in a long time and the rest was new! I'm starting to collect a fair amount of equipment...

Finally, at a little after 3:30pm I start heating my mash water. I do this on my stove to conserve my propane and reduce my time outside (it is winter after all, regardless of how warm it was). I've purchased 7 jugs of Absopure Spring Water at 1gallon 8oz per jug, for a total of just under 7-1/2 gallons, which turns out to be pretty much perfect. To start, I'm only heating 3-1/2 jugs worth, half of my water. When this reaches around 110-115 degrees, I pour about a gallon into my mash tun, to help warm the tun up, and continue to heat the rest of the water. This shortly reaches my target strike water temperature of 164 degrees. At this point, I add my grains into the small amount of water in my mash tun, in hopes to prevent "temperature shocking" of the grains. I very slowly pour the other 2-1/2 or so gallons of 164 (I think) degree water, called strike water, into the cooler with the grains, while stirring to prevent "dough balls". I must not have gotten my strike water hot enough because my mash was only at about 140 degrees at this point, and I was shooting for 150-152 degrees. No big deal, I just started heating a bit more water so I could warm it up. I ended up adding about a gallon extra at 170 degrees or so, and only managed to get my mash up to 146 degrees. Oh well, a cool mash will yield me a thinner more easily fermentable wort, in other words a dryer beer, and I like my beer dry, so I didn't sweat that too much. The mash sat for an hour after I tried to heat it up more, and man did it smell good! Smelled up the whole house like a cereal factory! I tested the ph of the mash, as I think it should be in the 5.5 area, and it was 6+. A quick couple of squirts of Phosphoric acid solved that, though I'm told it shouldn't really matter.

While the mash was sitting, I was warming up the remainder of my water for sparging (rinsing the grains). I'm also told that the ph of sparge water is somewhat important, and should also be in the 5.5 range. Well I think by the looks of the color of the test strip, it was about 3,472.5, or maybe more like 6.5. So I added one teaspoon of acid, as it's suggested to use small amounts... and that was apparently way too much, now it was off the scale in the other direction. Not knowing if this would cause a problem, and not knowing what to do, I added some pinches of baking soda to the water probably totaling about one teaspoon. This didn't seem to really make a big difference, so I decided to roll with it. Getting this water into the mash tun required a bit of shuffling though, as I had to have already drained the mash tun into the very same kettle before I could pour this water into it! So I poured this into my fermenter (5-gallon bucket) temporarily. Temperature is not especially crucial on this water, though around 170 is what I'm shooting for.

Now is time to start draining the mash. I drain a small amount into a small pot first to settle the grain bed into a filter some, and pour what I've drawn off back on top. This is called the Vorlauf. Normally you are supposed to drain until the wort runs clear, but my wort didn't really get clear even after cycling about a gallon, so I quit worrying about that. I'm guessing that my low mash temp probably got me some unconverted starch and protein that made my wort cloudy. I throw my hops into my kettle and start draining by wort on top of them. After draining all of the wort, I pour in my sparge water. This sits for a few minutes, and then I drain that into my kettle. This whole process has taken me more than 2 hours, and it's getting close to 6pm. This time of year, that's not far from dark!

I boil the beer out on the driveway. About 6:20pm I finally hit a rolling boil and I start counting down my boil hour. I've still got plenty to do fortunately, because this is otherwise the most boring part of the brew time. With some recipes I have hops to add periodically, but not this one. So instead I clean up all of the equipment I've use so far, and start a batch of sanitizer solution.

This is my cat, Maris Otter. He apparently learned that mash tuns are nice and warm, and decided to curl up next to mine for a nap after I began my boil. Fitting I suppose, since 85% of my grain bill is Maris Otter...

It was starting to get late at this point, but I had my wort chiller all ready, sitting in a frying pan in the snow by the front spigot.

As soon as the wort has boiled for one hour, I quickly cut the gas, cover the kettle, and carry it over to the chiller, drop the chiller in, crank on the water and cover it again. The combination of snow, cool air, and cold winter water made for quick chilling. I got to the mid 60s in about 25 minutes.

From this point forward, the wort is susceptible to infection from wild yeasts or airborne bacteria, so I make sure to keep it covered and everything that touches it from here forward must be sanitized.

Just my luck it started raining about 15 minutes into my chilling time. I didn't want to risk rain getting in the wort, so I had to get creative, and turned my mash tun upside down over my kettle and chiller. Worked great!

After getting my wort chilled, I carried it inside where I had a fermenter and lid, airlock, and turkey baster sanitized. I pour the wort into the fermenter, making sure that it splashes vigorously, which helps to aerate the wort.

Before putting the lid on, I use the turkey baster to take a small sample so I can measure the amount of sugar in the beer, called gravity. This wort weighs in at 1.046. A little lower than what I could've gotten from these grains, but there's nothing wrong with that. If I get a good healthy fermentation with my dry wort, I could end close to 5.0% abv.

Lastly, I need to pitch my yeast. The vial of WLP-001 has been warming up to room temperature for most of the day. So at about 7:45pm, I shake it and pour it in.

My basement is a wonderful 60-64 degrees this time of year. That's a great temperature for fermenting clean ales, which is exactly what I want. I close the lid on my fermenter and carry it to the basement and set it next to the back wall. Done! Or at least it should be...


Alas, I am cursed to never have a brewday go off trouble free. Besides my slight problems with temperature in my mash, and ph for my sparge, I haven't had any fermentation activity yet, and it's now been 27 hours since I pitched the WLP-001. Any brewers reading this may be wondering where the US-05 yeast comes in. Well, when I got out of work today and I still had not had any fermentation, I decided to run to my emergency brewing supplies store, Pauly's to buy some US-05 to pitch. I didn't want to buy the WLP-001 in the first place (US-05 is always my first choice for American Ales) but The Salamander was out of US-05. Apparently WLP-001 is much more sensitive to cold temperature than the US-05 and it seems that my wort was too cold for the yeast to start. At least that's what I'm hoping is wrong, becuase about the only other things that could keep my yeast from starting are bad/dead yeast, or a ph problem, and I could have caused a ph problem with my sparge water. I pitched the US-05 at about 5:45 pm today, so 22 hours after pitching my first yeast. It's 11pm now, so the US-05 has been in for about 5 hours, and I still have no air lock activity or Krausen forming. I'm going to move it upstairs over night, as it's still possible that the wort is too cool for the yeast to start, and being a little warmer over night might help. We shall see...

Lesson's learned? Well, make sure you strike water is hot enough and that you have more than necessary prepared. Always measure phosphoric acid in quarter-teaspoons or less.

Hopefully I'll learn more over the next couple of hours, and my yeasties will get to eating!