Brew day!

My electric brewery isn't done, but I have ingredients and want to brew today so I stole the brew kettle of it and put it on my gas burner.

Testing now with water, to clean it and check for leaks and all that. I hope the gas flame doesn't damage the outside end of the electric element, but I guess I'll find that out. It'll also be the first test of the counterflow cooler that I built about 5 years ago and never tried.

Good morning.....and happy brew day! Up early myself in preparation for brew day.

Keep us posted on how it goes!

Should have pulled the element...

Here's the DIY counterflow. Wasn't real happy with the performance at first, as the coolest I got was 90 degrees...but then I check the temperature of the water coming from the hose (before the connection to the counterflow) and it was 70 degrees, so it looks like the cooler works as well as could be expected and I just need a pre-cooler for the cooling water.

Gonefishing said:

Should have pulled the element...

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Or at least wrapped the end in aluminum foil perhaps.

Sorry to see....

Well, it's done and in the fermenter. I mis-guessed the volume I'd need to boil and collected about a gallon too much. After a 60 min boil I had...a gallon too much. I'll know next time to trust the calculator because I didn't lose crazy amounts to evaporation this time.
Anyway, the recipe is 9 pounds of 2-row, 1 pound of Crystal 40 and Cascade hops at 60 and 10 minutes. OG (corrected for temp) is 1.042, so this should be about a 4% beer if all goes well in the fermentation process.
It was a fun day. And, for a change, I cleaned up as I finished using things so I don't have any cleaning to look forward to with dread. I did one thing I've never done before, other than use this equipment that is...I used mostly tap water run through a charcoal filter.

And...it's in a keg. I was worried about off flavors because my basement got a bit too warm a couple of times, and it has been in the primary all this time...but I didn't detect anything weird when I tasted the sample twice tonight. It's actually not too bad for a warm flat beer.
Final numbers FG 1.008 yielding a 4.46 ABV, about what I expected. I think I might wish I'd dry-hopped it, but we'll see in a few days. I'm planning to cool it, toss some gelatin in and then carb it up.

Gonefishing said:

And...it's in a keg. I was worried about off flavors because my basement got a bit too warm a couple of times, and it has been in the primary all this time...up.

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The first few days of fermentation, up to high kreusen is temperature critical, after that not so much.

Well apparently I lucked out on the timing. We will be tapping this keg today so I'll find out for sure.

I've been drinking this for a few days now. It's gotten pretty good I think, and certainly is pretty. The beer itself is very clear, but the glasses had time to get condensation on them before I snapped the picture so you can't quite see the toaster knobs behind them.

Kinda of an update... still drinking this keg. Today my wife asked if I had any beer in my beer fridge and I said yes, homebrew. She said she felt like a beer so I went and got her a mug. Two sips in she says, "this is good!" There's hope for my Corona drinking wife yet!