After a short break I’m getting ready to brew once again. This time I’ll be working on a Belgian Wit recipe. I know this is not really the season for this type of a beer but I don’t care about that. So far I’ve brewed 4 batches of beer and the last two came out pretty good. I let my friends and co-workers taste them and they could not believe this came out of my garage! In fact I have about 6 bottles left of each batch; friends are asking for more, that is not a bad problem to have.
Few changes on how I will proceed with my brewing going forward:
- From day one I vowed to be very analytical when it comes to brewing and to concentrate a lot on data collection, unfortunately as a beginner I just got overwhelmed at the start and did not keep good records. That has to change right away. If I ever want to achieve repeatability collecting data at multiple points is a must. Batch #3 & #4 were good but I can’t make them again.
- SMaSH Brewing was a great way of getting into brewing. I had hoped to continue this until I tried all the hop varieties I purchased along with different yeast combinations but at this point I will venture into more complex recipes. So SMaSH brewing is going on hold for a bit.
- Lower Temp. I’m finding that I overshoot the mash temp quite a bit in almost every brew. Even when I compensated for this by lower the strike temp it was still too warm. Need more control over it. To help with that I insulated my mashtun from all sides; the pot now looks like a cooler! Yes, maybe I should have used a cooler instead of a pot like everyone else does!
- Do not use an airlock for yeast starter with a rubber stopper. I broke my 2000ml Erlenmeyer flask while brewing batch #3 because the rubber stopper got stuck/glued to the glass, malt is sticky, I should have know better. Luckily I wore gloves when I attempted to take the stopper out while the flask shattered in my hands. I’ll be covering it with aluminum foil going forward as my brother had recommended (he has 12+ years of lab experience growing all kinds of funky bacteria)
Hmm….what else? I guess that is about it for now. Tomorrow I’ll be making my starter and I hope to brew on Saturday, although I’m a bit under the weather so lets hope the cold goes away by then!
