Some Brewdays go Better than Others
Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 5:32 pm
Well, this weekend I think I endured the longest brewday I can remember in quite some time. I knew going in that it would be rough as my project was a double bock. I am using a 10 gallon Gott cooler as a mashtun and a beer this big was going to bump right up against the capacity of my system. Anyhow, I am also trying to put into production a new immersion chiller which I can't seem to get completely leak free. It seems I have just one more small leak to plug but at least I had the foresight to keep my old equipment in working order as a contingency. I also had a new thermometer port welded into my brew kettle and I just can't seem to find a dial model which will handle the 1/2" pipe threads and have a realatively short probe. I ended up swapping the thermometers around between my hot liquior tank and mash tun but found out that the new one I purchased does not seem to work. Oh well, I got around this by using a hand held cooking thermometer (works fine but is not my idea of an eligant solution if you know what I mean).
After screwing around with the pumbing issues I get to mashing. After doing three 30 minute decoctions I am starting to feel good about what is going on. I do batch sparging and use my pump to recirculate for 20 minutes before running off the batches into my cooper. With that much grain the my trusty mash/lauder tun I got very slow runoff (and there was no room to stir in rice hulls due to all the grain). I bet it took me better than two hours to get my preboil volume, and oh yeah, I was watching football at the same time and the Cowboys were playing awful. After finally getting the wort into my boiler things went better. I was slightly under my preboil gravity target so I boiled 1/2 hour longer to concentrate the wort. Actually, this migh end up working in my favor as the long boil will help carmelize the wort just a little more. After that, using my trusty counterflow chiller pumping icewater with my pond pump I finally got my cooled wort into the fermenter. The good news is that my original gravity turned out to be 1.085 which is only a point less than my target and I also ended up with the volume I was looking for so it's all good.
I really hope that I can get a pretty clean fermentation, when you have a starting gravity this high, it is really easy to stress the yeast which start producing all kinds of fruty esters (and God forbit fussels which would really be bad). I pitched a gigantic yeast cake of Wyeast 2006 from my last project a Munich Dunkel (3rd generation) so hopefully, I can get decent attenuation and avoid the nasty off flavors. From beginning to end, it was an 11 hour brew day, I started at 8:00AM and got finished at around 7:00PM. I sure hope the beer comes out well otherwise I suspect I will be just a little upset. Besides hitting my gravity, I didn't blaspheme excessively so I guess I would have to conclude it was a sucessful day.
After screwing around with the pumbing issues I get to mashing. After doing three 30 minute decoctions I am starting to feel good about what is going on. I do batch sparging and use my pump to recirculate for 20 minutes before running off the batches into my cooper. With that much grain the my trusty mash/lauder tun I got very slow runoff (and there was no room to stir in rice hulls due to all the grain). I bet it took me better than two hours to get my preboil volume, and oh yeah, I was watching football at the same time and the Cowboys were playing awful. After finally getting the wort into my boiler things went better. I was slightly under my preboil gravity target so I boiled 1/2 hour longer to concentrate the wort. Actually, this migh end up working in my favor as the long boil will help carmelize the wort just a little more. After that, using my trusty counterflow chiller pumping icewater with my pond pump I finally got my cooled wort into the fermenter. The good news is that my original gravity turned out to be 1.085 which is only a point less than my target and I also ended up with the volume I was looking for so it's all good.
I really hope that I can get a pretty clean fermentation, when you have a starting gravity this high, it is really easy to stress the yeast which start producing all kinds of fruty esters (and God forbit fussels which would really be bad). I pitched a gigantic yeast cake of Wyeast 2006 from my last project a Munich Dunkel (3rd generation) so hopefully, I can get decent attenuation and avoid the nasty off flavors. From beginning to end, it was an 11 hour brew day, I started at 8:00AM and got finished at around 7:00PM. I sure hope the beer comes out well otherwise I suspect I will be just a little upset. Besides hitting my gravity, I didn't blaspheme excessively so I guess I would have to conclude it was a sucessful day.
