My "Throw Crap together and could never replicate" brew session

So to start off I just want to say that my whole goal here was to just brew some beer and have fun doing it so here is how my day progressed.

10:30am-Started heating up mash water
10:35am-Milled what I thought to be a 20lb grain bill. My scale was MIA so I figured I would just eyeball it.
11:00-After milling what appeared to be at least 26lbs of grain, I doughed in with 9gallons of 168deg water and hit my 156deg mash temp.
12:00pm-Drained about 7gal of wort and sparged with another 6gals of 175deg sparge water. Added what I guess to be .25oz of bitter & sweet orange peel to the wort. Heard of wort hopping? Same idea just with orange peel.
12:20pm-Drained about 5.5gals of wort and sparged with 4gal of 170deg sparge water.
12:40pm-Drained 1gal for my pre boil volume of 13.5gal and started to boil.
12:55pm-After chilling some of the extra water in the mash tun I found that my 4th runnings where about 1.036 pre boil. So I sparged with another 4gals of 165deg water.
1:00pm-13.5gals of wort are boiling!
1:10pm-While my 10gal batch was coming up to a boil I ended up pulling a total of another 6.5gal from the mash tun with a pre boil gravity of 1.035
1:30pm-Tossed in my 1oz of Pearle for bittering into the 10gal batch.
2:10pm-Toss in what appears to be .75oz of crushed corrander, .25oz bitter & sweet orange peel.
2:35pm-Flame off and start the P&PC process. (Pump & Plate Chiller)-OG is 1.074
2:49pm-Both fermenters are filled.
2:50pm-Turn the flame on and start the boil process for the 6.5gal of extra runnings.
3:15pm-Houston we have boil! Add what appears to be .5oz of sweet orange peel & .5oz of Pearle for bittering
4:00pm-Dump in the rest of the sweet orange peel which appears to be another .5oz.
4:12pm-Add what appears to be .5oz of Pearle
4:15pm-Flame off and start the P&PC process.-OG is 1.045
5:30pm-I had three unlabeled slurrys in the fridge and I choose the one that smelled a little spicy and just like what a Wit Bier should smell like. Which from my best guess it is Wyeast 3644.
6:45pm-Houston we have yeast activity!

Also at some point in this half of a turkey baster fell into one of the carboys. So as I said before I knew going into this that this would be something that I could never replicate and that I was just going to experiement.

So I give to you my 5gallons of Bitter Sweet Orange Wit (on the left) and 10gallons of my FrankenWit (on the right).


And yes this really is half of a turkey baster in my carboy.


Here is my estimated recipe.

FrankenWit
90min boil

15# Rahr 2row
12# White Wheat Malt
2# Flaked Wheat
1# Carafoam
1# Crystal 15L
1oz Pearle 60mins
.25oz Bitter & Sweet Orange Peel in first runnings
.25oz Bitter & Sweet Orange Peel @ 60mins
.75oz Corrander @ 60mins

gotta love it. I have a couple "frankestein" batches that turned out real well. Once I got a mill and bulk grain I still didn't have a scalre so I was eyeballing my grains and hops... they all turned out very good though

I have a similar crazy brew about to go in secondary. IPA, stout, and chili stout all in one go...yum.

Why brew one when you can brew threee in the same amount of time

I have one of those with a gaggle of hops i will be trying in about 3 weeks.

If I were you, I'd PRAY that it's not the best beer you ever made.

It probably will be good! I brewed a light beer on time on the yeast cake and remains of an imperial stout. I took no og, I added whatever I had handy, and I called it "THE MUTT". When that one was done in the primary I pitched another batch of crazy ingredients on that yeast cake. It was fun to smell those batches and wonder what they would taste like. They both turned out great!
Thinking myself clever, I wanted a good name for the second brew. I pondered "Hair of the dog", "Son of MUTT", "Son af a *****" etc.

I finally settled on "Heir of the Dog", what do you think?(not that it matters what you call a beer)

rdwj said:

If I were you, I'd PRAY that it's not the best beer you ever made.

Click to expand...

The only drawback I can think of on this subject - the inability to replicate. We shall see...