Brewing Activities April 2016

Brewing up a blonde today. Mid boil currently. 1.050, kolsch/MO/US 2-row base with a touch of ashburn mild and honey malt. Bitter with northern brewer and 2 oz harmony hops late in the boil. London ale yeast. Quick, easy, and hopefully tasty.

 

Did a Yin & Yang. Belgian citrus Wit bier & Double Chocolate Stout.

 

Finished feeding sugar to NMB this weekend - 11.5lbs of sugar added in total. Sample tasting real solid. FG should be higher than last batch (desired). Excited to get this one into secondary.

Also stepped up my spontaneous started tonight.

 

IRS is fermenting wildly even tho I split the batch between 2 fermenters blow off tube is needed for both.

 

Lot's on the docket this month.

Bottle conditioning APA is done, and there are some great bottles and not so great bottles. Decided to keep it to ourselves (me and brew buddy.) The not so nice bottles have a heavy banana flavor (kinda neat) but also comes with a medicinal flavor as well. Poor sanitation I think, as well as slow cold break and lack luster water.

Stone Pale ale clone has been in the secondary for 2 weeks this Thursday. Going to give it a reading and taste - most likely ready to be bottled.

Porter (chocolate + honey) has been in primary for 10 days now. Had a vigorous fermentation and blew the top 3/4 off the bucket. BB rigged up a blow off and collected some good yeast.

Not sure what is in the works next - would like to do a Bells Two Heart clone.

Porter goodness! Large boil!


Rigged blowoff


Harvested from Blowoff


Cloudy APA

 

Belgian Dubbel- hit numbers right on the money. Still learning new things on the new system, but everything is working great, overall.

 

Did my first all grain BIAB beer, a saison, yesterday in my new 15 gallon kettle. Ended up with a lot more boil off than I thought so didn't get a full 5 gallons in the fermenter but my other numbers look good. Assuming I did all the measurements right I ended up with 82% mash efficiency. Definitely got to find a faster way to chill now that I'm doing full boils.

 

Did you adjust your efficiency calculation for the smaller post boil volume?

 

Yes, I wasn't off by that much luckily. I squeezed the crap out of the bag and ended up with a higher pre-boil amount by a gallon. I boiled a little longer to get it down to 7 gallons (target was 6.68) before starting the hop schedule, was going to do an extra 10 minutes since the hops I got had a much lower AA than BrewCipher started with. Target post boil was 5.1 gallons, realized I was getting close so went back to the original 60 minute schedule, ended up with 4.95 to 5 gallons in the kettle and about 4.75 in the fermenter.

Next brew I'll adjust the numbers some and keep the flame a little lower.

 

If you hit your target efficiency then you can top off your fermenter with water. Boiling too much is better than not boiling enough.

 

Added dry hops last night (day 5 of fermentation). Krausen had fallen, but the beer was still turbid as hell. I'm thinking that when you use what is almost a witbier malt/grainbill, yeast, water profile, and hopping doesn't matter that much when it comes to turbidity. The flavor/aroma may be a completely different story.

 

Spontaneously fermented starter is being cold crashed - going to brew with it tonight to create the final year in my 3-year gueuze project. Another batch of gose probably getting brewed tomorrow.

Planning on doing a tropical DIPA soon, as well as an imperial macaroon milk stout.

 

starter wort for 1318 IPA

 

IRS still fermenting well, made a session pale Sunday which is chugging along, making an @JohnSnowNW house pale original recipe tomorrow. Gotta have soma dat house pale when the greenhouses get hot!

 

Happy with my alpine Nelson spinoff. Haven't had the real thing but using Kohatu for the first time it seems like a fruitier Nelson. Has the same funkiness that Nelson does. I think it would be great in a saison or Berliner we issue fwiw. Also great in this pale/IPA. Seemed too fruity and sweet when I first kegged but the flavor is changing for the better.
Also planning an extra pale ale with mandarina citra and simcoe for this weekend got some house yeast from imperial and a new batch of Burlington ale yeast to use. Curious about the house yeast from imperial. Anyone used it?

 

Took a "sick day" at work to clean the keezer (de-mold a keg or two, clean, refresh dehumidifier balls), bottle last of passion fruit berliner and English Mild, keg 18 gallons of DIPA and 5 gallons of mild and fix the clogged poppet in my last keg of Brandy Vanilla Barrel Aged Dark Lord Clone which has not lost any coffee goodness in the eight months its been in the keg. Took 7 hours, but its done.

 

Spoke too soon. The yeast expiration is approaching, so I think I'll get some fresh.

 

I did some yeast washing for the first time. Now I have a few mason jars of 2206 Bavarian Lager in the fridge!
This weekend I'll be brewing my Munich Dunkel for the second time this year. I'm actually selling the whole 10gal batch to friends, which is cool! but I won't get any for myself.

 

What size batches do you do? I feel like all of your updates consist of 10 different beers.

 

Don't you mean your friends bought your ingredients for your dunkel?

Dunkels are awesome. My friend won gold at the NHC second round a couple years ago for his triple decocted Munich dunkel (e.g. melanoiden bomb).