Suburban Brewing

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!

November 7th is the American Homebrewers Association annual “Teach a Friend to Homebrew Day”. Many local brewshop will be hosting various events around this beer holiday as I’d like to call it 

This is a great opportunity to share our hobby with friends, neighbors and relatives.

If your shop is organizing an event on the 7th please let me know and I’ll add it to this post.

Ingredients:

• 8lbs Maris Otter
• 4.00 oz 2008 Fuggles hops (whole)
• WLP001 California Ale Yeast
• 7.25 gallons Drexel Hill water

24 hours before starting my first brewing session I created a 2 qt yeast starter using Extra Light DME and one vial of WLP001 California Ale Yeast. After 24 hours on a stir plate I decanted the yeast, let it settle and cool down gradually in my basement. After decanting I ended up with a little under a quart of yeast slurry.

On Sunday morning I picked up 45 pounds of ice for my pre-chiller and boiled 7.5 gallons of water to get rid of the chlorine. I let it cool down to 168 degrees (strike temp as calculated in BeerSmith)

I preheated my mashtun to 168 degrees with 1 gallon of water and combined it with 6.25 gallons of water from the other pot. I dumped 8 pounds of Maris Otter into the tun and let it sit for 90 minutes. I did have an issue with temperature control, actually it had to do with the strike water being too hot by 10 degrees. When I dumped MO into the tun it lowered the temp to 164; that is no where near the high end of what it should be (155-158). So I left the pot open to cool down as quickly as possible. What I should have done was to perhaps use ice or ice packs (inside a plastic bag) to lower the temperature. I came up with that solution a day later, unfortunately. Although the strike water was too high I think it would be easier to cool it down versus heating it so in the future I think I’ll stick with strike water that is a bit warmer then needed. Since I’m so new to brewing I really haven’t figured out how this high temperature will impact the final brew, maybe someone with more experience can chime in.

After 90 minutes I started to transfer the wort into the boil pot but before doing so I recalled what Dave Miller wrote in his book about transferring wort into the boil pot. He said it should take between 40 to 60 minutes to do the transfer. Basically the flow of the wort has to be very gentle and slow so the grain bed doesn’t collapse plus the slow flow helps to improve efficiency. With that knowledge I timed the flow out of the ball valve so it would take 50 minutes to fully drain. The first gallon or so I recycled back into the tun gently to remove any grain residue until the wort came out clear. My pot has a false bottom which helped with that.

After the wort drained into the boil pot I started to boil it for 90 minutes. Once it started to boil I added 2 oz of the hops at 90 minutes and 2 more ounces at 60 minutes. At 75 minutes I immersed my chiller in the wort to sanitize it for 15 minutes in the boiling wort. This is where a major problem occurred; I had iced water running through the chiller already which in turn caused the boil to stop! I panicked a bit at this point and increased the propane flow to bring the wort back to a boil. This turned out to be another mistake because the heat from the wort melted all 45 pounds of ice in my pre-chiller in a matter of minutes. In the end I was not able to bring the wort back to a boil and instead added more ice to my pre-chiller and continued the cooling process. It took about 30 minutes to lower the temperature to 68 degrees. I’m sure time would have been shorter if it wasn’t for the fact that I turned up the heat on full power for few minutes mid-way through the chilling phase.

Once chilled I drained my wort into a 6.5 gallon carboy and aerated with an aquarium pump for the duration of it being filled. Once full I pitched my yeast, covered it with a airlock and moved it from the garage to the basement.

Within 12 hours the yeast was going crazy! The airlock kept popping like mad releasing a lot of CO2. This was a good sign. As I finish this post on Sunday my beer has been fermenting full 7 days. I tasted it yesterday and it is not bad, a bit grainy but that is because it is still green. It is very hoppy as well so maybe I overdid it with 4 oz of hops but the flavors will most likely even out over time.

I brewed another batch today which took me half the time of the first batch. I made correction in the areas where I erred last time (ie the high mash temp and lowering of the chiller filled with ice water). I am hoping both batches will be good, so far both are looking good!

Yes! Finally! I brewed my first beer on Sunday. I will have an indepth report later this week as I’m away on business today and tomorrow.

In a nutshell I have learned that it takes alot of work, skill and patience to brew. After my first brewing experience I have even more respect for all amateur brewers as well as the professionals! As Ali G would say; “Respek”