It's been over a year since I've brewed beer. The family is out of town for the week so I took this time to build a nice collar for the keezer. I'll post more about that in a couple of days. For now, I've got a couple of beers that need to get brewed so here we go. First up is a pale ale ingredient kit from More Beer.
11lbs 2-row
12oz Crystal 60L
0.5oz Magnum @60
1oz Perle @30
2oz Cascade @1
1oz Cascase @0
!0 gallons of distilled with the following salts:
4g gypsum
6g calcium chloride
1g epsom
2g nacl
Wyeast beer nutrient. Whirlfloc.
Newyeast. Voss Kveik from Omega Yeast. OYL-061. Date = 26 Sept 2019. LC1C28
1:24pm - I was considering a double brew today. We'll just see how it goes. I'm already getting a really late start on this one. I'm boiling the O2 stone now and measuring out the salts.
1:56pm - Done measuring salts and boiling. Note to self, the scale is in a container. You have to take it out for it to work. I've also calibrated the new pH meter. I'm hungry. Gonna get some food.
3:43 - Doughed in. I had some problems with the ball valve. It was leaking. I needed to tighten it down real good. First time I've had to do that. I overshot the mash temp a little initially. I wanted 152 and got it up to 156. Then I added some cool water and got it down to 152ish. The new pH meter indicates that the mash is 4.9. That's a lot lower than the 5.3 that brewers friend tells me I should be getting. It's possible I measure everything out wrong. It also possible the probe has issues. I have no idea how long the probe sat unused. For fun I measured the distilled water which should be around 5.8 and it was. I re-measured the calibration solution to get 3.9, so it was reading a little low (it should read 4 with the calibration solution). If it is that low, then there's nothing I'm going to so about it. I could add some brewing salts but I think I'll just hang out and see how things turn out.
5:11 - I am boiling now. Pre-boil gravity is 1.040 which seems really low for 11lbs of grain. But I didn't pay very much attention during the sparge because three Mormon boys stopped by and chatted with me for an hour. I told them about how to make beer. They were nice. They tried to get me to come to church for Christmas. I politely declined.
7:57 - I'm cold. I'll update in a bit. But I'm done OG will be 1.048.
8:39 - Took a shower and am eating some chicken now. I'm feeling a little better. Ok. After the Mormons left I scrambled to get the therminator configured. I got real busy cleaning the lines and when I was done with that the brewing was done. It was then that I realized that I hadn't sanitized the therminator itself and so I set to doing that. It's been a year since I brewed and needed time to remember how to connect up the darn thing. So bad time management on my end. Once I got down to actually cooling the wort I ran into an issue in that the pump kept getting filled with air and then would refuse to pump. I have no idea why. But I would constantly need to stop and reconfigure the damn pump to get it to pump. And it's stressful because if the pump stops pumping and I don't notice, then hot wort goes into the fermenter. In the end I over did it since the wort got cooled to 64F. Way lower that what I needed. That's ok. Better than too hot.
The brew day took longer than usual today because it was difficult to get moving since it was so cold in the garage. A winter storm is coming. It's supposed to snow tomorrow morning and will be the first snow in a decade or so here in Ridgecrest. It will also be Thanksgiving so it should be real memorable. Since I made the keezer collar the polyurethane has been off gassing as it cures and leave vapors in the garage that are irritating my lungs so made sure as many doors in the garage were open today and that's what made it so cold. Couple that with the usual splashing of water on me during clean and man I was glad to get the day over. I couldn't imagine performing another brew today.
I must be really rusty. It seemed to take me so long to figure out what to do and how. I missed my mash temp, mash pH, gravity, and mismanaged time. I'm going to try and let it slide of off my back about how badly it seemed to go. Let's just wait and sample the beer. Maybe it will be great. It now lives in Ellie's closet in the large glass fermenter. I hope it doesn't explode yeast/beer all over her clothes. She doesn't deserve that. She left for the week with the kids. It was the nicest thing she could do for me. She's suffering right now with her family in Tracy. She reads these so...love you babe. Thanks!
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