conpewter
Well-Known Member
So I finally got to brew again on Saturday. Go to use 3 new pieces of equipment, first oatmeal stout, first recipe that I made etc.
Recipe and discussion here
I had new equipment...
Built a Keggle with spigot
New 10 gallon round mash tun
Everything went fine for the crush, preheating mash tun, getting sparge water heated etc. but then...
After the mash was done it was lunch time (currently mashing in kitchen, boiling outside). So I get it draining into the keggle as I'm eating with my wife and I turn around to a floor flooding with first runnings! Oh Crap! So I quickly turn off the spigot (Doh!) and we clean up the floor, probably .5 gallons of sweet wort
I was able to recover from this though. Since I had forgotten to mark any way of knowing how much liquid is in the keggle I had only a rough estimate of how much I actually got out of the first runnings. This would even be a problem if I had not dumped out some on the floor...
So I just sparged with two 3 gallon infusions and decided to boil for 90 minutes or more. So after all the runnings I'm boiling outside, run out of propane... Ok second tank in the BBQ grill, .... that one is really really light... So I end up throwing 2 tanks in my truck and going to the (thankfully) close-by place that fills propane (16.99 each, good deal?). I get back home and the rest of the boil goes fine. About 90 minutes in I take a gravity reading by dipping out some with a coffee cup and cooling it and doing my reading, right on at 1.056 woot! btw I boiled a little less than the .5 ounces of Pacific Gem due to wind blowing my cup over, I figured the extra long boil should yield slightly more AA out of the hops and balance that.
So I drain through my (new) counterflow chiller and get 5.25 gallons in the fermenter, great!! So I ended up with a somewhat crappy brewhouse efficiency (had ~13 lbs of grain including the 2 lbs 10 oz of oats) but I think that meant that my mash efficiency must have been pretty good if I could still almost hit my volume and OG targets.
The Counterflow chiller worked great (too good at first, 55* wort, had to let it run warmer to counter that near the end). Pitched my decanted starter into 68* wort and it was happily bubbling away yesterday morning.
P.S. No I did not put the "Floor Runnings" back into the brew...
Recipe and discussion here
I had new equipment...
Built a Keggle with spigot
New 10 gallon round mash tun
Everything went fine for the crush, preheating mash tun, getting sparge water heated etc. but then...
After the mash was done it was lunch time (currently mashing in kitchen, boiling outside). So I get it draining into the keggle as I'm eating with my wife and I turn around to a floor flooding with first runnings! Oh Crap! So I quickly turn off the spigot (Doh!) and we clean up the floor, probably .5 gallons of sweet wort
I was able to recover from this though. Since I had forgotten to mark any way of knowing how much liquid is in the keggle I had only a rough estimate of how much I actually got out of the first runnings. This would even be a problem if I had not dumped out some on the floor...
So I just sparged with two 3 gallon infusions and decided to boil for 90 minutes or more. So after all the runnings I'm boiling outside, run out of propane... Ok second tank in the BBQ grill, .... that one is really really light... So I end up throwing 2 tanks in my truck and going to the (thankfully) close-by place that fills propane (16.99 each, good deal?). I get back home and the rest of the boil goes fine. About 90 minutes in I take a gravity reading by dipping out some with a coffee cup and cooling it and doing my reading, right on at 1.056 woot! btw I boiled a little less than the .5 ounces of Pacific Gem due to wind blowing my cup over, I figured the extra long boil should yield slightly more AA out of the hops and balance that.
So I drain through my (new) counterflow chiller and get 5.25 gallons in the fermenter, great!! So I ended up with a somewhat crappy brewhouse efficiency (had ~13 lbs of grain including the 2 lbs 10 oz of oats) but I think that meant that my mash efficiency must have been pretty good if I could still almost hit my volume and OG targets.
The Counterflow chiller worked great (too good at first, 55* wort, had to let it run warmer to counter that near the end). Pitched my decanted starter into 68* wort and it was happily bubbling away yesterday morning.
P.S. No I did not put the "Floor Runnings" back into the brew...
