St. Patty's Day AG day...

After the kind people at HBT convinced me that I would not die in my garage if I brewed close to the open door and had plenty of circulation I decided my 17F brewday was a big go! Todays undertaking... RiClarke's Guinness clone. OG 1.053 Using a very cool beer souring technique taking 24 oz of 4 day old beer left out to sour and after pasteurizing it adding it to the flame out wort I hope to come close to making the mythical brew my SWMBO's relatives swilled. It was to be my second AG brew and I had much more (stupid) confidence than my first batch last week.
Once again I used Bobby_M and TH's water advice and spreadsheets to make mash only additions to get my RA where it needed to be whilst getting other values at least in the acceptable zones. This time I added a bit of baking soda to my 2 g of CaCL, 2 g of MgSo4, 2 g Gypsom, 3 g of baking soda and about .7g of NaCl... I added the backing soda, NaHCO3, to raise my RA because I was brewing a 24+ SRM beer. Roasted Barley is the culprit there, nice crunchy dark jewels of black looked like freckles speckled throughout my grainbed.

I scaled the recipe down from 5.5 gal to 5.25 (don't ask why - no good reason actually) with BeerSmith which does the scaling calculations for me. I had set the brewhouse eff. to 70 like RiClarke had in his recipe and BeerSmith called for an OG of 1.051. RiClarke got 1.053 and so did I. So both of us are getting more like 72.5% eff.

I did an initial draining of the tun after a 60 min rest at 154. Did two rounds of batch sparging first at 185 to achieve 168 which I nailed and the second at 175 or so and I came in just under 168 more like 167. My preboil was 1.044 and I was at just under 8 gallons of wort.

My East Kent Goldings was only at 5% so I had to use more than the recipe to get the same IBU's, just a bit over 40.. Ah the smell of hops wafting up through the wort steam entering my shnozola... not bad, not bad at all...

I pitched my yeast starter, about 750ml's, of Wyeast 1084 Irish Ale and in about 3 hours I have blub blub in my blow off rig. Thanks to Revvy who posted a picture of the blow off rig with a normal airlock with a tube fitted over the hole and then placed in a container with sanitized water or vodka if you have a lot of extra cheap vodka... Actually the blub blub sounds way more interesting this way, more like flatulence and for a guy that is interesting...

So my hose bib was frozen and rather than torch it I ran a hose through the garage door and into the kitchen sink (got a hose fitting there of course) and ran the chiller through 100 ft of garden hose, cooled the wort down in 25 min. to 68F and pitched the starter.

I need to stop rambling... got the AG bug and this is my St. Patty's day brew!