8.5 lbs Pilsner
12oz Carafa II
1.65 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 60mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 20mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 0mins
WLP830 x2 with 1 liter starter (stir plate) Lot num: 1002989, Date 3/4/14
Here's the water:
3:00pm - Got everything measured out. Boiled O2 stone. Going to start heating up strike water. I'm considering this the start of the brew day. If done by 9pm. Then we all good. Also, I bought some tubing and connectors and stuff to improve the cooling process. More on that later.
3:31pm - Got the water done and am heating up the strike water. Got the grain milled. Pulled the mash tun off the shelf and stuck my nose in it when I opened it, just like everytime. And it smelled foul. Almost like a mild vomit smell. I narrowed it down to the ball valve. I put the steel braid, washer, and ball valve real quick into a PBW solution with super hot water. I'll leave it for 15 mins or so. Since it's on the hot side, any infection will be killed in the boil so I'm not too worried but I plan to clean that valve more thoroughly and today. And if the beer tastes like shit, we'll know one possible reason why. I may just replace that ball valve. Maybe completely disassemble it and see if I can clean it.
3:54pm - Mash temp was a little high, 158F. I added some room temp water to get it to 151F. After the PBW wash the ball valve smelled a little better. I will re-access after the run off and give it another smell. Also, I will be sure to order up a new ball valve. Maybe it's time to replace the old mash tun. Also, pH came out a little high 5.5ish instead of 5.2. Probably won't be real bad but I think it goes to show that it won't be as dark a beer as I think it will be. Haven't had a bad brew day in a while. This day is going badly. It's my fucking birthday. Doesn't this brew day know. There's only one thing left to do I think. Time to start drinking. I bought some Gordon Biersch.
4:06pm - A bird flew in. I yelled at it. It flew out.
4:25pm - Sat down for a sec. Wanted to note that my temp controller box is having an issue. I made it such that the two key executables fire up upon boot up. But the tempcontroller program doesn't work. If I kill it, then restart it, it works. I think the issue is that the Pi I/O requires permissions that I had to setup to get pi user access to the I/O ports. I don't sudo the tempcontroller executable in the startup script so I don't know which user starts this up. It works when I log in and kill the process and restart because when I log in as the pi user, I now have permissions. Ergo, I think I have a permission issue. I just thought of this just now after having had beaten my head on the issue last night. Late last night. Working on my first Winter Bock. It's good.
5:50pm - Took a 30min break for Chinese food. Mongolian Beef. Pre-boil gravity is 1.042. Higher than I thought it would be. Kevin is on his way over.
6:14pm - Things looking up a little. I tried the wort. No vomit. Ellie feels the same. The wort tastes good. So maybe the malt bill is not so bad. Also, I fly my new plane tomorrow. So that's good. The vomit odor in the ball valve is completely gone. I made sure to clean the crap out of it. I'm gonna pour me another beer.
9:03pm - Done. OG was 1.050. A little higher than what I thought but that's ok. It tasted good. Looked a little more dark brown than black. I should google translate dark brown beer into German and use that to name this beer. Kevin came. We had good talks. The new cooling system worked like a champ. Basically we use the basin as a sump and re-circulate ice water through the coils. We got the wort down to 50F in 25 or so mins. Really fast. Everything else went without a hitch so I guess we'll see what happens.
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