Partial Mash Brew Day and Wyeast WMD

Monghetti · 02-21-2009, 11:44 PM

Hey Folks, got my first partial mash brew completed and sealed in the primary. I think it went pretty well. The partial mash is really pretty simple and I think I did alright. My water was probably a bit hot at 160* just about the entire 45 minutes. I sort of combined the instructions from AHS and those in the sticky by DeathBrewer (Thanks for that fantastic post DB).

I only had 3.25 LBS of grain (chocolate stout) so that came out to approx. 6.25 quarts of sparge water. Rather then pouring the sparge water over the grain bag, I tea-bagged the grain bag into the sparge water and then let it steep for 10 more minutes. I thought that the sparge water would cover the grains, but small amount of water (and smaller pot) didn't cover the grains completely. After the 10 minutes, I tea bagged a bit more and then poured the sparge water over the grain bag and into my main kettle. This should work out alright won't it?

This was also my first experience with the Wyeast smack pack. I activated the yeast last night and left it at about 76* for more then 12 hours. When I saw it this morning I thought for sure the package was going to blow! I knew when I was ready to pitch I would have to be quick, but man that yeast shot out of that package with some force. All the precious yeast went all over the cabinets and even on to my face. mmm mmm. Fortunately, I had sanitized the packaged and just put it into the wort until most of the pressure was released. Quite the scare. I think I only lost 78.4 million of the 100 billion yeast cells so I'm sure it will be fine. Does a smack pack explosion typically happen or did I leave it out too long before using?

Can't wait to try this brew! Thanks for listening.

Christian

**AFAJ Brew Guy** · 02-22-2009, 07:09 AM

Hey man congrats on your first PM. I have been very happy with moving to PM so far.

As for you sparge method sounds good to me. Really all you are doing with the sparge is washing the grains so I am sure that your method did that just fine. The easiest way to to tell with that is if you hit your target gravity.

As for th yeast, you will probably be ok, it just may take a little longer for fermentation to really get going. I have never had one explode on me, but then again I either make a starter or if I am feeling lazy I just smack the pack in the morning and use it about 5 hours later. I have had the get pretty hard, but never blow yeast at me.

All in all, sounds like you had a great brew day!

**ajf** · 02-22-2009, 02:59 PM

Another congrats on your first PM.
As for the exploding yeast pack, you can start to open it by just making a very small nick in the corner of the package, and let the pressure equalize before completing the opening.

-a.