Our meeting went well last Thursday. Oldbucket, along with his son, "Youngbucket" and I were in attendance. We swapped a few homebrews, and Oldbucket's Imperial IPA was a highlight. Oldbucket, can we have the recipe?
Oldbucket also talked about a cool new 1-tier, all-electric rig he was putting together to complement the kickass barroom project he's also involved in.
We brewed an all-grain oatmeal stout using BIAB, following this recipe:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f68/smooth-oatmeal-stout-50756/
...substituting UK Fuggle hops and Nottingham Ale yeast, due to availability.
The OG was very low (1.019) possibly due to low mash temp? Although I aimed for a mash temp of 156, temped the strike water and used the same temp for sparge water using this online calculator
http://www.brew365.com/mash_sparge_water_calculator.php, I didn't temp the mash, so it may have been off.
I've read that efficiency can suffer when using BIAB. Either way, the resulting wort was pleasingly clear. Does anyone have ideas for improving efficiency using BIAB?
I'm interested in seeing how it turns out, though. The crap coming out of the airlock (I put 5+ gallons in a 5 gallon bucket) tastes good. Most of my brews are way too sweet, and I've never had a "light" stout before. It might turn out to be a dark, bitter session beer. If the mash temp was low, I'm hoping that we got mostly fermentable sugars out of it, so the product will be dry and have at least a little ethanol kick.
In the meantime, today, I racked my first AG IPA (combining a couple of recipes) to secondary and, while doing some reading, discovered that I had dry hopped too early. It turns out you're not supposed to add hops when you pitch yeast. If you want to dry hop, you should do so during secondary. According to "The Internet," when your airlock smells nice and flowery during primary, it's because you're losing all of your aroma from the hops. Folks also say that if you dry hop too long/too early, you risk getting a rotted vegetable taste. I didn't taste any veggies when I sampled, so hopefully I should be alright. I added more hops, put the airlock on, and into the closet it went.
I'm looking forward to a next meeting. For a next brew, a couple of things were mentioned. FermentNEthinG had talked about a lambic, which sounds bitter, fruity, complex, and intriguing. I'm also thinking it would be enlightening to try to isolate and get to know hops flavors/aromas by brewing a neutral ale, separating into 1-gallon carboys, and adding different finishing hops to each.
Who wants to host?