Great day brewing yesterday

I just wanted to make a post saying I had a perfect day brewing yesterday. I was changing my procedure up a bit and every worked out great. First thing was using my new Barley Crusher. At first I was having problems with it sticking but that was my fault for turning down the torque on the drill. Once I increased that a bit I had no problems at all.

I've had some problems in the past hitting my strike water temperatures even with preheating the mash tun (10 gal igloo cooler) so I thought I'd try a different tact and run the mash water through a 25' chiller coil in a pot with some water. It did add a few more minutes to my day, but the end result was worth it. After mixing in my grains I was only 0.5 degrees off so that really made it worth the extra effort.

I also had the help of a friend who came over to see how it was all done so I got to teach someone else how to brew! :rockin:

After sparging and hitting my pre-boil volume exactly, my mash efficiencies were much better than before. I went from a 74% to a 84%!

After a successful boil and using a prechiller (same 25' chiller in ice water bath) along with my 50' chiller, I dropped that temp down to 75 degrees in no time. After whirlpool and settling, I managed to pull the wort off with little trub and dumped 5.75 gal into my 6 gal better bottle. Added the yeast from the starter and into the chest freezer. Checked this morning and it's bubblin' away! This is going to be a robust chocolate coconut porter so in about a week or so, I'll be adding the toasted coconut. 2nd time making this recipe and can't wait to have it again!

Hope everyone else had such a successful brewing weekend!

Desertups said:

Hope everyone else had such a successful brewing weekend!

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Don't I wish.

We tried our first 11 gallon Belgian Wit AG beer this past weekend. Mash was too thick. We didn't have a stuck sparge, but we were 2 gallons short of our pre-boil volume, so we added the 2 gallons. We're not sure if the 2 pounds of rice hulls sucked up the water (we did pre-soak them for 10 minutes before adding them to the mash) or if the flaked wheat really sucked up the water, moreso than barley does. It was probably the flaked wheat.

Then we had the brilliant idea of adding pseudo-crushed coriander and orange peel bits directly into the boiling wort without using a hop spider, foolishly thinking that those bits of coriander and orange peel would just flow through our pump and CFC without a problem. It completely clogged the CFC once and the second time gave us a pretty weak flow. I honestly do not know what the hell we were thinking. None of us were drunk.

So we were .75 gallons short of our target volume and 7 points low on our target OG. [Sigh] We'll do better next time.

But on the plus side, the weather was really nice and we got to try out the new Bayou Classic KAB6 burner. Worked really well.

Sorry you had a rough day. I did a rye ipa the week before and was also a little short on the target volume so maybe someone can tell us if wheat malts tend to soak up more water. I only used a 0.5 lb of rice hulls in the porter i made yesterday (I always use 0.5 lbs, just a habit I've picked up) so I'm not sure if rice hulls soak up that much. Glad the burner worked out. The good thing about making beer is that even if it doesn't quite turn out the way you want, you can still probably drink it and then try again!