Epic brew day...

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Saccharomyces

Be good to your yeast...
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Pflugerville, Texas
Brewed the Maharaja clone on Saturday. What a brew day.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/maharaja-clone-93250/

Since I was brewing 10 gallons at OG 1.090, I was mashing a whopping 42# of grain; 38# of 2-row and 4# of specialty grains. I ended up encountering a few challenges and doing a little seat of the pants engineering to get through this brew day!

Challenge #1: How to heat 13 gallons of strike water in less than a year.
Solution: Dough in half the grain, then heat the other half of the strike water. Use a big burner. Borrow Soperbrew's brew kettle. Melt the plastic off of the valve handle of Soperbrew's kettle. Oops.

Heating sparge water for the second half of the mash while the first mash works its magic:

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Challenge #2: Realize all the grain won't fit into your mash tun, which is a measly 17.5 gallons in capacity. DO'oh!
Solution: Mash half the grains in a 48qt cooler. After sparging the first half of the mash, transfer spent grain into a kettle (will get to that later), and then sparge the second mash in the MLT. This added about a half hour to the brew day but otherwise wasn't complicated at all. In fact, it was so simple, I think I will try to brew a double batch sometime using this method!

Doughing in the second mash:

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... have to post the pr0n. 6oz of bittering hops:

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Collected 13.5 gallons in a 15 gallon kettle. Yes, Ma, foam control drops really do work!

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For the partigyle brew, I knew I would have too many spent grains to be able to steep the additional specialty grains properly, so I did a minimash in my 5 gallon cooler with a little 2-row and some 5.2 stabilizer to keep the pH from getting too low. I transferred the extra spent grains into the mash tun, and then sparged the spent grains running off into the 5 gallon cooler (basically using the runoff of the 2-row from the first mash to sparge the second mini-mash).

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90 minute hop addition in the big kettle (yes, Texas beat their @$$es in the Fiesta Bowl):

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I did a 30 minute addition in a separate hop bag, and a 15 minute addition was added to the same bag as the bittering hops. At flameout I pulled the hop bag out of the main boil and dropped it into the partigyle kettle for 45 minutes, making the partigyle beer a true partigyle beer including the hops!
 
Drat, I don't have any photos of it, but it was really windy on Saturday as it often is in the winter here. The flames on the burners kept blowing out, so Chris had the idea to collect a bunch of empty boxes around the garage and put bricks in them to form a windbreak. That worked really well. I'll build a proper wind break before my next brew day.

I also learned that my new 30PSI Banjo burner will not work anymore once a tank is down to 1/3 full. There isn't enough pressure generated to keep the burner going and the flame goes out. Time to scour Craigslist looking for a 40# tank. Thankfully Chris brought over a spare LP tank along with his brew pot, and a burner I wanted to use to heat the sparge water for the partigyle but couldn't because it was too windy.
 
What a day! Hope they turn out well.

I think I have the same burner as you, and I really hate it. I'm on a fairly limited income, and I hate that I have to exchange my tank when it is still 1/3 full.

I think I'm going to try and find smaller used one...
 
Holy ****, that's a lot of grain. I have that same huge coleman cooler and I guess now i know how much grain it can hold.
 
Yeah at 1.25 qt/lb, I think about 30# is a practical limit for this cooler. 35# is probably doable, but you'd have to take forever to dough in to get the doughballs worked out of the mash.
 
What a day! Hope they turn out well.

I think I have the same burner as you, and I really hate it. I'm on a fairly limited income, and I hate that I have to exchange my tank when it is still 1/3 full.

I think I'm going to try and find smaller used one...

There are still good propane suppliers around who will refill a tank and just charge you for what they put in, not for the full exchange. Blue Rhino is making a metric buttload of money selling the same 1/2 gallon of leftover propane over and over again.
 
That's funny, when I looked at that pic of your neighborhood, the first thing I thought of was my old neighborhood in Pflugerville, then I look over at your profile and it says Pflugerville, Texas. I am guessing you live in one of those neighborhoods off Victoria Station or Pflugerville Loop?
 
I think the propane tank is getting to cold. I have had brews where the tank started forming ice on the outside. Set the tank in a container of warm water and this problem should go away.
Congrats a troubled but problem free brew!

I too think this is your problem. The liquid in the bottle should generate the same amount of pressure at 1/3 that it does at full (assuming the same temperature of course). Because of the high rate of burn it's probably starting to freeze the liquid and stop the pressure. Once the tank is warmed back up I bet you could fire it off again and burn the rest.

I once had a guy change a valve on a large propane tank that was almost full - he attached a huge burner to it and ran it until it froze the liquid, then quickly changed the valve before it had a chance to thaw and start making pressure again.
 
That's funny, when I looked at that pic of your neighborhood, the first thing I thought of was my old neighborhood in Pflugerville, then I look over at your profile and it says Pflugerville, Texas. I am guessing you live in one of those neighborhoods off Victoria Station or Pflugerville Loop?

Yeah I live right behind Park Crest Middle School off of Black Locust and Pfennig.

Shameless plug, I bumped the other thread, this beast went from 1.102 to 1.014 and is on the second week of dry hopping now. OMG OMG OMG gravity sample is so good. Like, OMG! :drunk:
 
Forgot to bump the thread, the partigyle beer I made from this was epic too, the recipe came out so good I went back through my notes and posted the recipe in my dropdown. I will be re-brewing the smoked porter this fall, and I'll probably cry when the keg kicks. :eek:
 
I find shaking the tank when it get to about a third full help also! You can hear the flame perk right up.
 
Nice, reminds me of when I brewed hopinator :)
I have my propane tank a little bit closer to my burner than you, so a LITTLE residual heat transfers that way. It also helps that its in a smaller area so the wind doesn't get to it. Its also in full sunlight, which in AZ might as well be a bottle blanket for metallic objects :)

Also, even if you mash at 1.25qt/lbs, a little bit of fermcap does wonders to making those dough balls break up! Seriously is there anything fermcap doesn't improve related to brewing?
Improves starters - no boilovers and lower krauzen buildup
Improves mash by helping brewing salt dissolving as well as breaking of dough balls
Improves boiling by reducing hop oil loss (improved hop utilization) / protein expulsion and no boilovers
Improves fermentation by less expulsion taste and head retaining proteins
 
So, what do we call you? Blue shorts guy?.....Mr Baggy pants? Shiny pot dude? .......The choice is yours! ;) (Not really, you will always be Blue Shorts Guy)
 
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