I brew BIAB, and I've finally come up with a recipe good enough that my roommate asked me to brew it again despite the fact that our last 50 bottles of the stuff just came ready three weeks ago. Granted, they're almost gone now. So I agreed with him, and I'm rebrewing something that came out well before (if it comes out well again, I'll post the recipe in the database).
Anyways, heating up the strike water for the mash, and I hear a sizzling on my stove. Pop over to see what's up, and there's water all over it. My six-gallon stainless steel mash pot has split down the side, and water is pouring out. Thing is less than two years old too. What gives?
So I figure I've already got a starter going already and I'm going out of town next week, so I'd better make some beer today. So I pull out my eight-gallon brew kettle and decide to mash in that. Put my standard 4 gallons of strike in there, put in my grain bag, and tie off the top of my grain bag because it won't fit around the rim like it did with the smaller pot. Preheat the oven to 170, turn it off, and stick the kettle in there. (I do this in an attempt to insulate, not to continue heating the kettle during the mash). Thermometer read 149 when I put it in, but when I pull it out after an hour and a half, it's reading 142. I forgot that my eight-gallon pot has a lot more headspace and thus won't insulate as well as my six-gallon. I would've just gone with a thinner mash if I'd thought about it, but I didn't. So I'll have a light-bodied beer (which is fine, that's why I was at 149 in the first place), but who the hell knows what my conversion is like. (I don't have a refractometer, but I took a hydrometer sample and stuck it in the fridge to try to get it to proper temperatures. We'll see what I see.)
So with my six-gallon pot out of commission, I decided to sparge in my old four-gallon pot from the extract days. I had to use less sparge water than usual because the pot was small, so when I put the grain bag in there, the sparge water pretty quickly dropped from 180 to about 155. So I don't even know how much it helped, but I stirred it around and teabagged a couple times, and then I pulled the grain bag and let it drain. The draining was a little slow, so as I sometimes do, I squeezed the side of the bag, and because I couldn't very well squeeze the bottom, I poke it with the end of my mash paddle. . . which this time poked a hole straight through the bottom of the bag.
So I'm down a grain bag, down a six-gallon pot, and I have no idea what my conversion is going to be like. It's still boiling, so who knows what else is in store. I'm sure this will come out as beer, but it's going to take a bloody miracle for it to turn out anything like I was hoping. My goodness.
Anyways, heating up the strike water for the mash, and I hear a sizzling on my stove. Pop over to see what's up, and there's water all over it. My six-gallon stainless steel mash pot has split down the side, and water is pouring out. Thing is less than two years old too. What gives?
So I figure I've already got a starter going already and I'm going out of town next week, so I'd better make some beer today. So I pull out my eight-gallon brew kettle and decide to mash in that. Put my standard 4 gallons of strike in there, put in my grain bag, and tie off the top of my grain bag because it won't fit around the rim like it did with the smaller pot. Preheat the oven to 170, turn it off, and stick the kettle in there. (I do this in an attempt to insulate, not to continue heating the kettle during the mash). Thermometer read 149 when I put it in, but when I pull it out after an hour and a half, it's reading 142. I forgot that my eight-gallon pot has a lot more headspace and thus won't insulate as well as my six-gallon. I would've just gone with a thinner mash if I'd thought about it, but I didn't. So I'll have a light-bodied beer (which is fine, that's why I was at 149 in the first place), but who the hell knows what my conversion is like. (I don't have a refractometer, but I took a hydrometer sample and stuck it in the fridge to try to get it to proper temperatures. We'll see what I see.)
So with my six-gallon pot out of commission, I decided to sparge in my old four-gallon pot from the extract days. I had to use less sparge water than usual because the pot was small, so when I put the grain bag in there, the sparge water pretty quickly dropped from 180 to about 155. So I don't even know how much it helped, but I stirred it around and teabagged a couple times, and then I pulled the grain bag and let it drain. The draining was a little slow, so as I sometimes do, I squeezed the side of the bag, and because I couldn't very well squeeze the bottom, I poke it with the end of my mash paddle. . . which this time poked a hole straight through the bottom of the bag.
So I'm down a grain bag, down a six-gallon pot, and I have no idea what my conversion is going to be like. It's still boiling, so who knows what else is in store. I'm sure this will come out as beer, but it's going to take a bloody miracle for it to turn out anything like I was hoping. My goodness.
