Labor Day weekend brewing, anyone?

A 10 gallon (non pilsner malt / non saison) batch usually takes me 5-6 hours including clean up.

Wow today's rye saison brew was the longest brew day I've ever had! Nearly 9 hours start to finish including clean up....

It was the product of the following:
- 90 minute mash (wanted extra fermentability to get the saison FG as low as possible)
- 10 minute mash out
- 90 minute boil (pilsner malt)
- Getting greedy and deciding to brew a 15 gallon batch on my system (15g HLT, 15g MLT, 20g BK) which meant heating my sparge water and heating my boil kettle took forever. Also meant chilling took longer as well.
- Brewing solo today

Oh well I guess one way to celebrate Labor Day is by doing a boat load of labor

 

Hyrum, just down the road. Cool.

 

Well, this was an interesting brew day. I tried a number of new things:

(1) First time batch sparging. As expected, efficiency was lower: 69% vs typically 80% when fly sparging. At most I saved 10 minutes, so I may not do it anymore. Depends if I think it helps at all with lowering astringency.

(2) First time with a valve on the kettle for draining into the fermenter. Worked fine, but I need to go for a larger boil kettle. I generally add water at the end; did it this time with preboiled water, which I had to chill before dumping into the kettle. Next time will have to cool that water earlier.

(3) First time fermenting in the fermentation cabinet with the evaporative cooler going (I'll post a picture in another thread). For those of you familiar with the evaporative coolers that we use in the intermountain west to cool our houses, this is a miniature version for cooling the cabiinet.

(4) First time explicitly following advice at yeastcalc.com and then cold crashing the yeast starter. I probably should have poured out more of the liquid before pitching and I probably could have ended up with more yeast in the fermenter (I didn't shake it well enough, but I didn't want to dump the stir bar). All in all it seems OK, as the wort started bubbling in < 4 hours.

 

You can use another magnet to remove the stirbar before pitching.

 

Yesterday's batch. Started bubbling an hour after I pitched the yeast. Imperial Pumpkin Pie Ale, 1.091 OG.

The day was pretty disaster-free other than me accidentally pushing a bung into one of the carboys. I tried to fish it out with a screwdriver before it fell all the way in, hope I didn't infect it!

 

Brilliant!

 

Farmers Market in Wheatridge Co. They do a really good job with local produce.

 

Brewed a 5 gallon Holiday Saison Sunday night using 3726 =)
I love making Saisons, no ice pack switching. It's my 7th batch and by far went the smoothest.
I've got my RIS done with primary now, need to bottle this. Planned on it yesterday but I was too hungover lol.