Swift Creek Brewery - Brown Ale Recipe (12 Gallons to fermenter/carboy)
18lbs Pale Malt
3.5lbs 80L Crystal Malt
1lb Chocolate Malt
1lb Brown Sugar (90min)
0.5oz Chinook (90min)
1.5oz Chinook (10min)
3.0oz Williamette (10min)
2.5oz Williamette (dry hop secondary)
2pkgs Irish Ale Yeast (White Labs #WLP004)
OG/FG: 1.067/1.018
First batch on new system... it was a LONG day (7.5 hours total time), but an awesome brew. Smoked a cigar with Kevin (father in law), made the following changes to recipe on the fly... did not carmalize brown sugar (boiled and added from stove), only mashed for 60 minutes @ 154, did mashout for 20 minutes, boiled for 90. Did not add 5 minute hops, will dry hop with these. Hit 94% efficiency (if you include the 0.5 gallons I discarded because I wanted to leave some headroom in carboy and fermenter) 1.067 on 12 gallons, as opposed to 1.057 recipe OG based on same volume and 80% efficiency. WOW. Several things I need to change next time, or soon:
1) priming the wort pump... think about the order in which you open valves here - lost about 20 minutes to this
2) heat up a full 24 gallons in HLT... I started with 20, and ended up adding 4 gallons to HLT during mash, and this brought temps down for 15 minutes or so
3) 5 ounces of hops is about all the current hop strainer can handle, but it worked like a champ! will need bigger (and deeper) one for IPAs
4) relocate all RTD probes (castermmt was right)
5) immersion chiller got below 100 degrees within 20 minutes, but need to build CFC soon
6) must figure out a way to ferment 15 gallons soon, and I don't want to go with two 6 gallon carboys and a 7 gallon stainless fermenter
Three weeks until I keg this batch!