Homebrewing Live Blogging
As I mentioned on Twitter this morning, early to bed, early to rise makes a man want to brew beer...apparently. Certainly Ben Franklin had this thought too before settling on the whole wealthy/wise thing. Anyway, 've been putting off my latest batch of brew for various reasons. Well, not any more.
Although it is a balmy 16 degrees outside I've got the garage heated to a slightly less balmy 39 and hopefully enough air flow the CO2 from the heaters doesn't render me unconscious in a pool of my own slobber.
09:25
I'm drinking coffee. (See how exciting this is going to be?)
09:36
I'm heating my strike water and getting ready to mash. I'm also trying to heat up my brew garden hose, as even though it's been in the garage, it's still frozen. Nice.
09:54
I added 2.7 gallons of strike water in three batches to my grain bill. I'm brewing an ESB. Here's my recipe:
6.5 lbs 2 Row
8 ozs Caramunich Malt
4 ozs Flaked Wheat
1.5 ozs Chocolate Malt
Hops: 1 oz Goldings, East Ken for 60 minutes
Although The Drew scoffs at the use of technology while brewing (this coming from an IT guru of all people too!), I use two apps. Primarily, I use iBrewmaster. It has a great database for storing/creating recipes and tracks the entire brew process.
iBrewmaster falls a little short when it comes to all-grain calculations like figuring stike/sparge water amounts and temperatures (although lately they have made improvements to better document the steps), so I turn to BrewPal for those figures. I would also like to see improvements in both for recording boil gravity and temperature corrections to calculate mash efficiency. Typically, I break out the calculator and figure it on the side, but it would certainly be nice to have these features built into the app.
Hey, good news. Thanks to a friend at work, my new coupling and thermometer are working.
11:06
Sparge. Round one of my sparge is underway. I'm sparging with 4.7 gallons of water. I added in two steps. I checked the mash halfway through and thanks to the cold, the temperature dropped. It looks like towards the end, it dropped below 150. I should still be good, but time will tell....and damn, my heater just ran out of propane.
11:35
Vorlauf & run off collection.
And a quick run into the house to battle my never ending cable modem reset problems...argh.
11:55
I've achieved boil and I'm adding in the whole leaf hops. I'm also listening to a little Bing Crosby...it is that time of year after all.
According to "my math", I had an 82 % efficiency on my mash. Hmmm, I need to check that...it's almost too good to be true.
12:45
About 15 minutes left in the boil, so I'm dropping in my wort chiller. I'm also trying to rapidly de-ice (again) my water supply hose. Thankfully, unlike last winter, I haven't blown out my outside faucet. I thought I had the hose all ready to go, but there must be some ice stuck in it somewhere. I'm making a mental note to do a better job walking the water out of it before I stow it today.
13:20
The wort is chilled and I started to fill my fermenting bucket. I typically aerate using an attachment on the drain hose, but instead I'm going to use a stone with a filter and some air from a compressor. This is new, so hopefully there are no long term problems...ie: infection.
My final gravity reading, 1.037, was right on the money. The final ABV should clock out somewhere around 3.41%. This is going to be a total session beer...if it lasts that long with the guys around.
16:00
I get my Internet connection back! Yeah, live blogging is a little difficult when the Internet goes down. Looking back, the whole process went well. I had to use hop leaves versus pellets, so I had some trouble getting the kettle screen clear capturing the last gallon of wort. Because my brew time was off, I also had to just pitch a vial of yeast. There was no starter and no handy smack pack.
All in all, a successful morning. No gas poisoning, no fire and no frostbite. Now to schedule the next brewday with the rest of the Society!
