So I won best in show at the home-brew competition and get to brew beer with Transplants. I mentioned that I could brew a home-brewed version of the agreed upon beer that we could sample and talk about and they seemed receptive of that so here it goes.
The base recipe for this will be the Helles recipe from the Brewing Classic Styles book.
9lbs pilsner
0.75lbs munich
0.25lbs melanoidin
Hallertau 3.8%AA @60min
Whirlfloc
WLP830 x2 - MFG Jun 20, 2017 - LOT# 1039785
Now I had wanted WLP838 because it's the most sulfury but the Bearded Brewer didn't carry it because...it's a little too sulfury. So we went with WLP830. Another thing I did here that I've never done was to step it up twice. I made two starters for this yeast over the course of a week. I left it on the stir plate for 48 hours, then put it in the fridge for 48 hours to drop the yeast out of suspension, decanted, added fresh wort and left it for 48 hours, and now its been in the fridge for 48 hours. Dylan recommended a two step for lagers. Also, I felt that the yeast was a little old and I didn't have the cell count for one starter.
I'm forgoing yeast nutrient. There is data indicating that it contributes to esters. In a delicate beer like this I want to suppress those as much as I can.
As far as water goes I plan to use a very soft water profile. Found a link here from braukaiser that lots of forms link to for a Helles water profile. I'm going to add 3g epsom and 3g CaCl to 10 gallons of distilled. This should give me Ca: 22 Mg: 8 Na: 0 Cl: 39 SO4: 31 HCO: 0 (units are mg/L). Even with this soft water I still won't have enough acid in the grains to get the pH down so I will add 3g lactic acid. This should get me to a pH of 5.3. We will see.
As fas as the fruit goes, I asked the brewers at Transplants what they use for fruit and they said purees. Ok. So I got some fruit puree. Shout out to the Bearded Brewer for a quick get on that. I have four purees; apricot, plum, peach, and sweet cherry. I was recommended a pound per gallon so I guess we'll go with that. I plan to split the batch into 5, one gallon secondary fermenters. One for each fruit and one of just a plain Helles. I like Helles, so that's for me. After a couple weeks in secondary I will bottle condition them and take on over to Transplants for tasting.
11:30 - Boiling O2 stone now. I'll calibrate the steel thermometer while I'm at it. I'm thinking I should get another steel thermometer to verify/backup the other one. Come to think of it, I should get two. Cause what if one reads different that the other. Then what do you do? How do you know which one is right.
12:04 - Got the brew salts all measured out. Along with the lactic acid. I calibrated the pH meter and then tragedy struck. I went to pull out a trash bag from the overhead cabinet above the dryer. You know, where I've staged everything up until now. Once I pulled out a trash bag, the whole roll came with it and crashed upon the staged ingredients. The lactic acid spilled out. So I had to clean that up as best I could and will need to remeasure. But the largest tragedy was that the glass that put the O2 stone in fell over and broke. I'm going to re-boil the stone to kill the germs. But I broke the glass. Streak broken. 15 years and not a glass broke in this house by me. I can't throw that in anybody's face anymore.
1:08 - Mashed in at 150F. We started a little high which way easier to fix that too low. Took a little time to get down there but we're ok. The pH at dough in was 5.35. After the 3g of lactic was are at 5.1. So we are a little low there but I read data suggesting the lower the better for esters. This brew day has been slow for some reason. All kinds of little things going wrong. The crusher gave me grief. One roller got stuck/jammed. The ball valve on one of the kettles started leaking. I had to stop and take it apart and put it back together. Such is life.
2:17 - Mash went well. Pre-boil is 1.037ish. We should get 1.047 post boil. That's right in style. So there's something that went well. 90 minute boil now.
3:22 - Cleaned a keg. Cleaned the fermentation chamber. Cleaned the mash tun. Cleaned...you get the idea.
5:42 - Brew day done. I had issues cooling the beer down. I used the immersion chiller and ran ice water through it. But for some reason after 60F the temp just would not drop. I got it down to 58F before getting it in the fermentation chamber. I'll slowly lower the temp over the next 24 hours down to 50F. Other than that everything seemed to go ok. The OG will be 1.052 which is a little higher than I thought it would be but that was after a 90 minute boil so I guess that makes sense. Anyhow, it's in the hands of the beer gods now.
