Experimental: Leftovers and Extras

Yesterday was brew day, and I got a batch of IPA going that I'm excited about. Went out this morning, 12 hours after pitching, and the liquid was literally dancing around inside, bubbling 2-3 times a second and just swirling around. I'm a bit leery it might explode . . . but I digress.

I decided to have some fun with the leftover sparge water in my MT that I had drained to another cooler. I got about a gallon of it, brought it up to 1.5 or so with some pre-boiled water (sparge water from the HLT), and took a gravity reading. It was about 1.020 after dilution, so I decided I'd add some sugar, 10oz. Hit the heat. Hops? Well, there's a local bush that's just about done for the season, I don't know what variety, but I went and grabbed an ounce of cones and tossed them in at 60, 30, and 1 minute. Iced it down, transferred to a 3-gallon carboy I had around, and pitched some re-hydrated yeast. Bread yeast. From my freezer. It was foaming like crazy by the time I got it pitched. This morning, it was swirling around just like the big batch.

This was just an experiment to see how many curveballs I could throw at a mini-batch, so we'll see what happens. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even approachable, but we shall see.

I think the bread yeast might be the downfall with this..you could have put a splash of the big one in !

Ah, dang! Good call, I never thought of that. Oh well, like I said, the only real cost on this batch was a couple of hours of work and some more propane.