Waiting for the brew in Harvard, MA

[Geigon]

Hi Folks:

I'm just getting back into brewing after (gads) a 10 year hiatus. I've been re-reading my tattered copies of Charlie Papazian's "Complete Joy of Home Brewing" and Dave Miller's "The Complete Handbook of Home Brewing". It's clear some water tests are in order as we installed a water softener about 4 years back. I just brewed up a Belgian Strong Ale (All grain) last week using Poland Springs water and yesterday brewed a Guinness clone using our unsoftened water as Dave says Guinness likes the hard stuff. Between the two brews I constructed the 10 gal Mash/Lauter Tun using instructions I found on the web and I'm really pleased with the results (I'd been using a 5 gal. water cooler and Charlie's bucket lauter tun), it's nice to have the extra room.

I discovered this web site and it's great to see this resource! Thanks to the community for making this work!

Cheers,
-Brad

 

[MeThirsty]

Hey man, welcome back to brewing!! I'm sure you've forgotten more than some of us have learned!! I'm sure this board will benefit greatly from your experience!! Hope your two new brews turn out awesome man.

 

[Geigon]

Thanks. I'm looking forward to contributing.

Cheers,
-Brad

 

[Greyhound]

Welcome from Shirley, MA. I bicycle through Harvard quite a bit - beautiful town. I had heard that Harvard is a dry town. Is that (still) true?

 

[Golddiggie]

I can only imaging the how much more is available now, compared with when you stopped brewing.

I would recommend reading up about the long primary, no secondary, method that many of us employ. Since I went to that mode, I've been getting great brews time and again. It's even easier if you go with stainless steel fermenters (I'm using kegs right now).

Out of curiosity, what are you using to chill your hot wort down with? I started with the ice mode when brewing extract. Tried the ice bath for a batch, then went to an immersion chiller for a while. I'm waiting for my Chillhog 4000 and RebelSmart to arrive (along with some QD's)... I have a small pump that I'll be able to use for running either PBW or StarSan through the chiller too. Since I use either nylon or muslin bags for my hops, I don't expect to have an issue with crap getting trapped inside it. IF I do, then backflushing will take care of it (plan to do that after each batch)...

Good to see another person in New England brewing, and proud of doing so.

 

[Geigon]

Hi Greyhound,

The Harvard General Store now sells beer and wine and Fruitlands has a license to serve large functions. The town voted a while back to open up a limited number of license and we're now in the trial period. This of course doesn't have any impact on home brewing, but it's nice to not have to drive five miles for a beer.

Cheers,
-Brad

 

[Geigon]

Hi Golddiggie,

Thanks for pointing me to single fermentation. I definitely want to learn more about that. The Belgian that I started a week ago is now in the secondary and I had plans to repack my stout to a secondary this weekend. I may want to change that now.

As for wort chilling now that's a story. On my very first extract brew I calculated just how much ice I would need to add to cool down the wort believing that this would be very fast and I could limit the added water this was. Sure enough initially the ice was melting great. I didn't account for how long it would take the ice to melt when the temp of the wort dropped considerably. It seemed like it took forever to cool it down and of course I was nervous about contamination and the like. In the end it was fine the beer was OK for my first brew but definitely got me wanting to move on to more advanced brewing. So I research a better way to cool wort and found instructions on how to create a counterflow wort chiller in the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.home brewing (the web didn't exist until two years later). The counterflow wort chiller use 40' of copper tubing and a garden hose along with some vinyl tubing collars and some Y hose connectors. It was a fun project but man is it hard to stuff 40' of copper tubing through a garden hose. Best part though is that I can cool my wort from 212 F to 53 F in the amount of time it takes to syphon the wort out of the carboy! Awesome cold break. And the wort chiller still works great today!

Cheers,
-Brad