First Brew Follies

[TexasTea]

I should have made a video for comic relief when anyone needs a laugh. I could have used yakety sax (Benny Hill theme song) for the soundtrack. The first time is always the worst.

Post brew observations. I need a better stainless pot for boiling wort. The one I used is dented up a bit, has a concave bottom and I had to shift the thing around on the electric burner to get a nice rolling boil . I got a workout. I'm going to take a rubber mallet and try to bang that stainless steel bottom flatter. If that don't work I may get one with a valve for next time. Also I took too long to heat up wort. I should have set the burner on high right away.

Then there was steeping the bag of grains. I need better tongs. I dropped it 8 times back into the wort trying to grab it by the knot and get it out after steeping. I didn't squeeze it but I sure hope I didn't knock all the tannins into the wort from doing that. I tried to feed the spent bag of grains to the chickens after cooling and they turned their beeks up at it and wouldn't eat it. So into the compost they went (the grains, not the chickens).

Then I bumped into the handle of my water reserve bucket (for adding to the wort later) and water was running on the floor until I noticed I had a flood. Mopped up and went to get more water.

Wort chiller (Stainless coil hooks to kitchen faucet) only got the wort down to 80 F because its well water, but I had bought 24 pounds of ice to augment. I'm sure glad I did that. The ambient room temp was 78, but the wort measured 75 F in the middle. After melting 24 pounds of Ice I couldn't get it down any further so I took a hydrometer reading first and then pitched yeast.
1.048 at 75 F

After pitching yeast (SafAle US 05- 1 packet) I put the lid on, and filled the airlock with 50% grain alcohol/water . Now I had to put that bucket on a hand truck and run it out to the garage where the FC is. I waited until I had the bucket in the chamber before putting on the airlock. I should have covered the airlock hole with a piece of tinfoil while running it out the garage, but I didn't. I sure hope I didn't mix that yeast up too much by moving that bucket a good 50 yards on that handtruck.

FC set at 70 +/- 2 F. I taped the probe on the bucket and it went up to 80 briefly (from me touching it I think) but returned to 74 quickly, slowly cooled and its been bouncing from 69.3 to 71.8 ever since.

It's been about 17 hours and when I checked the airlock this morning all the liquid is pushed to one side and I'm getting about 1 bubble per second so its doing something.

Post Brew worries- Contamination - I'm hoping my technique was good enough. I used the no rinse cleaner that came with the Block Party Amber Ale kit- Sodium Carbonate Peroxy Hydrate. Yep about a tsp fell out of the airstone hose I had sanitized into the wort because of course it did.

Aeration- I hope I got enough in there and the yeasties don't stall out. . I sparged about 1/2 an hour but the airstone was only 2-3 inches in the water (I need a longer hose). When I got the water from the well it blew through a carbon filter with 5 um media pretty vigorously, that may have put some air in it. I poured the wort from countertop height to a bucket on the floor hoping to increase aeration (and did the same with the water added to the wort). I sloshed it around a bit but should have done more I think.

Even if this turns out good, Next time I will aerate that water over night with some airstones.

If you guys see where I made a horrendous error, or can do something better next time please let me know. Thanks guys.

 

[hotbeer]

Aeration- I hope I got enough in there and the yeasties don't stall out. . I sparged about 1/2 an hour but the airstone was only 2-3 inches in the water (I need a longer hose). When I got the water from the well it blew through a carbon filter with 5 um media pretty vigorously, that may have put some air in it. I poured the wort from countertop height to a bucket on the floor hoping to increase aeration (and did the same with the water added to the wort). I sloshed it around a bit but should have done more I think.

You don't need to aerate the wort if you are using dry yeast. It won't hurt if you do. But it's unnecessary. I use US-05 quite a bit for my pale ales and IPA's. I've never aerated.

Not sure about your comment that you sparged with a air stone for half an hour. We usually use sparge as a term for a mash process. But I'm guessing you are simply meaning that you blew air through the wort after it was boiled and cooled. If you did it during your sparge of the mash, then you did it at the wrong time. Just be aware that using sparge to refer to anything but rinsing the mashed malts with water will add confusion. So just say you blew air through it!


Yes, you need a pot with a flat surface if you are using a electric burner. I use a 3500 watt induction burner to boil my beer. And it'll give me a really good boil. If your burner is struggling to give you a hard boil, you'll do well to get a burner, electric, gas or induction that will. Some say you don't need to boil hard. But I have not found that to be always true. I still like to boil very hard. So get something that gives you options. I rest easy knowing that if I want to that I can boil softly. Where as those that can only boil softly and have learned to live with it can't boil hard!

I also still use a very large stock pot to boil in. No fancy valve in the bottom or such. But I only do 3 gallons at the most, so I can lift my boil kettle to pour the wort into the fermenter. 5 gallons or more might be an issue that requires a valve. Or just a siphon hose.

How did you use the ice with your chiller? I run tap water into a big canner and have a aquarium water pump to push water through my chiller till it gets down as low as it'll go. 75 - 80ish degrees F. Then I dump ice into the canner and let the cold water be pumped through the chiller to get it the rest of the way down. And at that point the water can just be recirculated into the canner.

I squeeze the heck out of the bag if I need the volume. IMO, the tannins are already in the wort if they are there. Squeezing just gets more wort with the same ratio of tannins. But that's something I only believe and have no proof for. Squeezing opinions are currently just rooted in dogma and I know of no actual study about it.

If you guys see where I made a horrendous error, or can do something better next time please let me know. Thanks guys.

Sounds like it went pretty well. I've heard worse and probably have done worse. Yet still the beer was good.

Did you record all the weights and volumes of everything you used and what weight or volume of wort you got at each step of the way? As well as the weight of what you threw out.

Keeping a good journal of your brew day with all the info will help you sort things out later when you have a lot of batches behind you.

 

[TexasTea]

No I didn't blow any air into the wort, I was using the sanitized airstone /hose to aerate the water used to cool and then dilute the wort to volume. Sorry, I didn't state that clearly. I was thinking that it would put some oxygen in there for the yeast.

Thanks Hotbeer for responding. Hearing that you never aerate makes me feel much better.

I'm doing 5 gallon batches, I'm small in stature (150 lbs , five foot 7, in my upper 60s ), so lifting up 5 gallon batches and/or langstroth deep boxes with 10 frames of honey is a pain. But the wort is only 2.5 - 3 gallons or so before adding cool water. I can't get in there enough with a rubber mallet to flatten it, so I'm going to try a different pot next time with a flatter bottom.

I just ran tapwater through the wort chiller while the bucket of wort was in a sink full of ice. I like your idea of pumping icewater through the chiller. I think I have an aquarium water pump laying around here somewhere.

I made this from an extract kit and all the details were in the formula that I followed it exactly. I measured the wort water with volumetric glassware. The malt extract, yeast, hops pellets etc were all premeasured. But I used the lines on the Fermentation bucket for measuring volume of water adds to dilute the wort and I understand they may not be correct, so next time I will measure volume or weight of everything as I add it and write it down. This time all I wrote down was temp and specific gravity before adding yeast.

Oh one more thing, I saw those fermentation buckets were kinda translucent, so I threw a thick contractors trash bag over the 5 gallon batch when I had to haul it 50 yards through the texas sun to the FC so the sunlight didn't start degrading the hops and making off flavors.

Thanks again for your excellent advice. I really appreciate it.

 

[MograhmDeadbraid]

Sounds like your process had a few kinks. No need to worry IMO. Brewing beer isn't building a house. If this batch doesn't work there is always a new one to be brewed. Keeping notes is very important. The more details you have on the session the more you will learn and improve. I am old school and have a three ring binder with a crap ton of notes. Just keep brewing!

 

[BrewZer]

I can't get in there enough with a rubber mallet to flatten it, so I'm going to try a different pot next time with a flatter bottom.

Get a 3-foot (or as long as necessary) 2x4 and put the pot on a flat surface (like a concrete floor). Bang the bottom flat with a small sledge hammer by moving the 2x4 around the bottom as necessary.