BierGut
Well-Known Member
So I brewed my first AG batch yesterday, 5 gallons of APA. My assistant and I had a lot of fun and I'm sure the beer will be delicious but we did fumble our way through the day.
Sunday morning 9am: My digital scale only measures about 900 grams at a time (my recipe is in oz.), no big deal, it just took a little bit of math and measuring for my 3883g of base malt. Ok next comes the 1lb.0.5oz. of Munich Malt, or so I thought, I accidentally measured out Crystal 20, whoops...I brush it off as a rookie mistake.
This being the first time using my barley crusher it was recommended that I run .5lb of grain through it and discard it. I thought "oh just my luck because I'd used .5lb too much Crystal 20 anyway", so my assistant dumps it into the hopper and I start milling using my cordless drill. The grain was hardly crushed, if at all? Hmmmm run it through again....same thing. One more time. Oh duh, I'm pushing the grain up and over the rollers instead of pulling it through. Ok one more time. Battery dead. One fully charged battery pack later and now we have a perfect crush.:rockin:
I'm reluctant to use water from my garden hose so we fill up in the kitchen. On our way out the door the ball valve gets bumped against something and opens it full bore, shooting maybe a qt. of water into my kitchen.
Water heated, mash in, hit our temps. Mash out, batch sparge, hit our pre-boil gravity of 1.047. We do a 60 minute boil and we're right at 5 gallons, hitting our target post boil gravity of 1.056. Chilled and yeast pitched. I guess we didn't do too bad during the second half of the day but it sure did start off messy.
Sunday morning 9am: My digital scale only measures about 900 grams at a time (my recipe is in oz.), no big deal, it just took a little bit of math and measuring for my 3883g of base malt. Ok next comes the 1lb.0.5oz. of Munich Malt, or so I thought, I accidentally measured out Crystal 20, whoops...I brush it off as a rookie mistake.
This being the first time using my barley crusher it was recommended that I run .5lb of grain through it and discard it. I thought "oh just my luck because I'd used .5lb too much Crystal 20 anyway", so my assistant dumps it into the hopper and I start milling using my cordless drill. The grain was hardly crushed, if at all? Hmmmm run it through again....same thing. One more time. Oh duh, I'm pushing the grain up and over the rollers instead of pulling it through. Ok one more time. Battery dead. One fully charged battery pack later and now we have a perfect crush.:rockin:
I'm reluctant to use water from my garden hose so we fill up in the kitchen. On our way out the door the ball valve gets bumped against something and opens it full bore, shooting maybe a qt. of water into my kitchen.
Water heated, mash in, hit our temps. Mash out, batch sparge, hit our pre-boil gravity of 1.047. We do a 60 minute boil and we're right at 5 gallons, hitting our target post boil gravity of 1.056. Chilled and yeast pitched. I guess we didn't do too bad during the second half of the day but it sure did start off messy.
