Brew Brother Jacob put me in for a spot in the big AHA competition. So I figured I will give it a go. Even it I don't make it in to the AHA competition I'll find one somewhere and enter it.
9lb 2 row
1lb C10
2oz Mittlefruh 2.5% AA
WLP001 with starter. MFG: Oct 29, 2016. Lot 1030987
Servomyces
Whirfloc
I'm writing this the night before just to save some time. The starter boiled over and made a mess. That sucked.
I've also targeted a light beer with malty profile for the water. I will start with 10 gallons of distilled and add the following:
2g Gypsum
6g Calcium Chloride
2g Epsom Salt
2g Canning Salt
4:30 - We are well into the brew day now. I've just mashed in at 152F. Nailed it. Beyond the usual things I do for the day I have calibrated my pH meter. To do this I had three styrofoam cups. I poured some 7.01 in one cup, 4.01 in another, and tap water in a third. I rinsed the probe in tap water(this is the first time it has been used and is covered in storage crap) and put it in the 7.01. I then started the calibration process and when it had calibrated for a pH of 7 I rinsed it in the tap water cup and then moved it to the 4.01. When it calibrated to 4 I dunked it in the tap water and took a measurement. What I measured was interesting. It measured 6.3. I know we have hard water here so I confused by this measurement. The probe measured the 7 and 4 solution ok so I don't know what to think about this. I moved on with life. I dumped the pH buffers in the sink in the garage. I poured out the tap water from the the one cup and added in storage solution. I put the probe in that and then went on making beer. After initial dough in I took a sample from the mash tun in a cup and measured it at 5.34. I'm happy with this and will not make any changes right now.
4:43 - The spare water now measures in at about 5.8. I'm adding 2 grams of lactic acid to see what changes that makes.
4:51 - 2 grams of lactic acid to 7.5 gallons of water at a pH of 5.8 turns the water to a pH of 4.0. I was hoping for 5.2. So I over shot it a bit. At this point I have two options. First is to completely replace the spare water. That means I've got to get to the store and buy more distilled water, then I've got to measure out the brewing salts, then I've got to add to correct amount of acid, and then heat it up. That will take hours. Options two is to just roll with it and see what happens. Now that I'm thinking about I suppose another option would be to add some brewing salts with bicarbonates to drop the pH.
5:01 - Ok. I added 2g of calcium carbonate. It now measures 5.15. Nailed it! Haha. Can't wait to see how this turns out.
5:15 - I also have 5.2 stabilizer. I might have been able to use that. For fun, next batch we will use the 5.2 and see how well it works.
9:15 - Beer day over. The pH once all the wort was collected was 5.3. I feel good about that. I've attached a picture below. I've clean the pH probe and stored in the storage solution. I'll need to keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn't dry out. That will kill the probe. I forgot to collect my wort sample before I cleaned everything. I went back and had to pull a sample from the fermenter. OG is 1.048 which is right where I wanted. The other interesting thing that happened was that the temp controller didn't appear to connect to the network. I figured this was because we updated the security setting in the house a month or so ago. So it was a big challenge to open up that box and connect a keyboard/mouse dongle and an HDMI so I could update the settings. Got it done though as so far it seems to be working.
