Frodo
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Just reporting back in on my first AG experience - Guinness Clone recipe that I found discussed on this site. The guts of the recipe were 8 lb Pale, 3 lb flaked barley, (EDIT: Plus 1 lb roasted barley as well), 2 oz Goldings, 22 oz soured Guinness, Nottingham dry yeast. It went as good as I could expect but I learned some stuff - I'm posting what I learned and maybe can help someone else striking out into AG. If anyone sees any improvements I can make to this process, I'm all ears.
Lessons:
1) Initial mash temp was way low at 140 F even though I "tried" to preheat the mash tun (10 gal round cooler) with hot water. Maybe next time I'll get add the strike water to the mash tun first, make sure the volume is right and the temp has stabilized at what Beersmith says it should be, then add the grain. I had to heat water to boiling (I had extra that was at around 170F, so it was relatively quick though still 10-15 min) and add it to the mash bringing the temp to 154F and volume closer to 2qts/lb of grain (I was trying for 1.2 qt/lb).
2) Three stuck sparges (flaked barley was the culprit I'm guessing after reading about it again in Palmer) - maybe should have used some rice hulls, or a protein rest.
3) Tried to fly sparge using 1/2" high temp tubing to apply the sparge water to top of the grain bed - no sparge arm. Couldn't keep from disturbing the grain bed this way, even using a ladle to slow the flow of water to the top (the ladle was used in conjunction with the tubing). Also with the dark color of the mash liquid I couldn't even really see the depth of water I had over of the main body of the grain. Maybe I'll just batch sparge for now, figure out fly sparging later.
4) Used my boil pot as the HLT & draining the wort into a bucket for measuring the volume. Then transferred that back to the boil pot after the sparge. Introduced a lot of air I think transferring the wort - hopefully it didn't get hot-side oxidized. Maybe I'll just use a rectangular cooler for the HLT in the future, drain the wort directly into the kettle and use a marked stick to measure volume.
5) Took WAYYYY long to heat water... Need a better burner I think... it was 40F outside when I was brewing though - I'm sure that didn't help.
6) 82% efficiency. So happy about that! Now I'll have a 6.5% ABV Guinness clone? Dang it!
Lessons:
1) Initial mash temp was way low at 140 F even though I "tried" to preheat the mash tun (10 gal round cooler) with hot water. Maybe next time I'll get add the strike water to the mash tun first, make sure the volume is right and the temp has stabilized at what Beersmith says it should be, then add the grain. I had to heat water to boiling (I had extra that was at around 170F, so it was relatively quick though still 10-15 min) and add it to the mash bringing the temp to 154F and volume closer to 2qts/lb of grain (I was trying for 1.2 qt/lb).
2) Three stuck sparges (flaked barley was the culprit I'm guessing after reading about it again in Palmer) - maybe should have used some rice hulls, or a protein rest.
3) Tried to fly sparge using 1/2" high temp tubing to apply the sparge water to top of the grain bed - no sparge arm. Couldn't keep from disturbing the grain bed this way, even using a ladle to slow the flow of water to the top (the ladle was used in conjunction with the tubing). Also with the dark color of the mash liquid I couldn't even really see the depth of water I had over of the main body of the grain. Maybe I'll just batch sparge for now, figure out fly sparging later.
4) Used my boil pot as the HLT & draining the wort into a bucket for measuring the volume. Then transferred that back to the boil pot after the sparge. Introduced a lot of air I think transferring the wort - hopefully it didn't get hot-side oxidized. Maybe I'll just use a rectangular cooler for the HLT in the future, drain the wort directly into the kettle and use a marked stick to measure volume.
5) Took WAYYYY long to heat water... Need a better burner I think... it was 40F outside when I was brewing though - I'm sure that didn't help.
6) 82% efficiency. So happy about that! Now I'll have a 6.5% ABV Guinness clone? Dang it!