Dunkles Club Brew

 The guys thought it would be fun to brew a dunkle. Ok. We got the bearded brewer to ship me the ingredients and I kitted it up for the boys. The recipe is from an old BYO article.

10lbs Weyermann Dark Munich Malt
4oz Melanoidin malt
4oz Carafa II

2oz Tettnanger Hops 3.4% AA

Saflager W-34/70. This is a dry yeast. Bearded brewer recommended switching to dry. Let's try it out. I don't think we need to hit it with O2. Dry yeast doesn't need it.

2:30 - I had to build up the new propane burner. I'm really dragging today. Like most days now. Kids keep me from sleeping well. I'm about to measure out the salts for today. I'm going with:

8g - CaCO3 (Chalk)
4g - CaCl
2g - Epsom

3:45 - I don't know why everything is so slow today. I've calibrated my thermometers. Put together the mash tun and the boil kettle. I'm heating up strike water now. I'm going to try for 152F for the mash today. The new burner smells bad.

4:53 - Heating up sparge water. We hit our first snag of the day when it appears that the batteries of the pH meter are dead and it takes coin cell batteries. Second thing came up and that was when I went to clean the keg, there was no PBW. I remembered then that I was out. And I just ordered stuff from MoreBeer. I guess that's how life is. I'm now using OxyClean for the keg. We will see how well it works.

6:02 - Well into the boil now. I've cleaned the mash tun. Made a mess. Got the rig a little wet with wort. So it should be sticky later when I try to move it. I added about a pound of DME to the wort to get the gravity to where I think it will be 1.050. I was really struggling with this for some reason. I would take a sample, add wort and then the gravity number was smaller which is impossible. Eventually I used the pipette to grab wort and sample it. When I was though I got a sample of 1.040 which should be right. I usually pick up 0.010 in the boil. I don't know why suddenly I'm missing my gravities by sooo much. I brew so seldom now I can't find the time to figure it out. It's just what it is at this point. I've now moved beer ingredients to the fridge in the back yard. I'm hoping this will allow the serving fridge to air out.

8:15 - All done. O.G will be over 1.050. I was worried at first since the hydrometer measured in at 1.040 but then I realized I took it straight from the kettle which was still hot. So I probably added a little too much DME but it tasted a little bit bitter when I sampled it so maybe it will all balance out. I ran out of ice. Luckily there was enough in the freezer. I got the plate chiller to cool the wort down to 62ish. That works since I can slowly walk the beer down to 55 over the next day or so. Bugsy came in to "help" me clean. I asked him to stay in the garage or he would have to leave. That was bouncing off the walls hard and couldn't "control his body" as his former teachers used to say. Eventually he left the garage one too many times and dad kicked him out. Not so sad since he was hungry anyway.

Anyway that ends the day. I need PBW. Maybe I'll add in something to clear up the cider I'm thinking of making. I picked some up at the store while I was getting water and ice. I'm thinking of returning Gavin's bottle with some.

AHA Big Brew

Well, I've installed myself as the president of a brew club in town. Not because I want to be president of something but because I want a brew club and I know what I want it to look like. So I started one and am doing me best to mold it into that image. My hope is that in a year or so, the club will be taken over by someone more eager and I will get to enjoy culture I established until I die. Anyhow I digress...One thing I wanted for the club was to have an internal homebrew competition and I planned to do it in the fall during a yearly festival. Covid struck and as such we can no longer meet at Flight Line Tap Room (our new home). One thing I thought might bring us together would be to brew together but separately. The AHA Big Brew was May 2nd and the thinking was that we were going to get together to brew until the pandemic arrived. So I thought we could combine these two events and brew the AHA recipe as a club and use that as our internal homebrew competition. We thought we could reach out to our local homebrew shop 100 miles away and throw him some business. The recipe was strange and the ingredients hard to get to Dylan did best to substitute and put together a big ass order and had it shipped to me. I kitted these up and had the guys come over the Friday before and we all sort of brewed together but separate that weekend. Except I have kids. And I need time when they are away to brew. So I picked this Friday since I thought that FedEx would deliver my MoreBeer order which contained a new burner since the old was leaking on Thursday, which they did not. So brew bother Jacob hooked me up with a burner. That's a lot of catching up of my brewing world right there. Ok, here's the recipe:

 50.0     6.00 lbs. Maris Otter                   Great Britain  1.038      4
 41.7     5.00 lbs. Pilsener                      Germany        1.038      2
  8.3     1.00 lbs. Cara-Pils Dextrine Malt                      1.033      2

  1.00 oz.    Chinook                           Pellet  13.00  49.7  60 min.
  0.50 oz.    El Dorado                         Pellet  15.00  14.2  15 min.
  1.00 oz.    Samba                             Pellet  11.60   0.0  0 min.
  0.50 oz.    El Dorado                         Pellet  15.00   0.0  0 min.
  1.00 oz.    Cashmere                          Pellet   9.60   0.0  Dry Hop
  1.00 oz.    El Dorado                         Pellet  15.00   0.0  Dry Hop
  1.00 oz.    Samba                             Pellet  11.60   0.0  Dry Hop

Lallemand Voss Kveik

We will be using distilled water with the following additions to the mash:
10g gypsum
1g epsom salt
1g NaCl
2g Calcium Chloride

We will try to measure the pH but I don't think any of the pH meters will be accurate right now. I have plans to add 1g of lactic to the mash to drop the pH to 5.4. I was going to measure and see then decide if I add it. It may just be a bust and I will have to add anyway.

Junny wants to have the spent grain for baking so I need to remember not to throw things away.

1:45 - It's late. I'm going to be still brewing by the time the kids get back and I feel bad about it. I'm going to have to find a way to make it up to the women. Anyhow, I've boiled the O2 stone, calibrated the thermometers, calibrated the refractometer, measured out my salts, assembled the mash tun, moved around the garage a bit, measured out the acid, calibrated the pH meter (it seems to be working great), and I'm sure other things. I need to heat up my strike water and grind the grain.

2:27 - I've just mashed in. I wanted a lower mash temp since I thought the Cara-Pils would be enough to give the brew body. Lowering the mash temp would also yield more ethanol. So that's nice. Initially the mash was too hot so I added some cool water. And I added too much and ended up about 147. Not tragic though. Next I measured the pH and got 5.0. That's a little low. I wanted 5.4 so this was off by quite a bit. I'm not sure if the brew calculator is off, if I used it wrong, or if I measured wrong. In any case, I am NOT adding additional acid. I did sprinkle a little 5.2 stabilizer in there hoping it would bring it up but that was a fail. I did nothing. So I guess we have what we have, don't we.

3:24 - Draining the last of the wort now. It doesn't taste as sweet as I was hoping. Pre-boil gravity is 1.040 and it should be 1.050. So this beer is a big big miss.

4:24 - Something that I did that maaaay disqualify me from the contest is that I held back on the early hop additions. Since I didn't hit my gravity I didn't have the malt backbone for so much hops. So added about 3/4. Almost done with the boil now.

5:23 - Ok I've cooled the wort and pitched the yeast. This yeast likes to be warm I guess so I'm putting it in my closet. Something I didn't pay attention to was that the yeast wants to be hydrated first before pitching. I noticed the direction on the packet as I was about to cut it open. So I go into the dishwasher and get the glass measuring cup and pour 100ml of water into it. The cup was warm from just having got out of the dishwasher and the water was warm because it was sitting in the garage. The packet indicated 30C so I think I got the temp covered. I forgot to sanitize the cup but it shouldn't be too bad it just came out of the dishwasher. The big screw up was the water. It was the water I was drinking. So all my mouth germs are now in the beer. Soooo, this beer is going to be awful. I guess I had a fun day though. I'm going to clean up now and I think I will clean the kegs while I am at it.

5:45 - O.G will be 1.050. Way off. I wanted 1.060 which I usually get. Was it because I mashed too cool. I don't know. I tasted the sample of wort that I took for the gravity measurement and it was awful. Tasted like burnt rubber.