one long crappy brewday

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2nd Street Brewery

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Castleton NY
Well, planned on brewing the 10 gal batch of my Dead Guy clone that I never got to on Labor Day yesterday.

First problem was when I went to mill my grain on Saturday night. Both batteries for my drill came up dead. I got about a pound and a half done before giving up and figured I'd let them charge overnight and get an early start in the AM.

Well 8 AM rolls around, and it is raining out, nothing much, I'm watching the weather and they're calling for cloudy with chance of rain later in the day so I figure I'm safe. I go down to finish milling my grain and the damn batteries are still dead, very little charge. Now I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to do this. I tried to rig up a hand crank with little success. I ended up doing a mix between my mill(after charging the drill and getting about 30 secs of power at a shot) and using a food processor on pulse to grind it up(I know)
What I ended up with was a flour like substance with a lot of whole grains in it. :mad:

Well I'm committed at this point so I get my strike water hot and go ahead. Hit my temps pretty close(a couple degrees high, but held well over the hour). Just as I'm getting ready to drain the first runnings I start hearing rumbles of thunder. Now I'm not normally to concerned around storms, but I figured since I'm in the midlle of my yard under a pop up pavilion surrounded by SS kegs and propane tanks and such, That I decided to head in and let it go by.
45 minutes later before I can drain the MT, by this time my sparge water had cooled down below where I wanted it, couldn't heat more and ended up with just about 10-11 gals in the kettle not the 12-13 I was shooting for.

Boil goes uneventfully, I cool the wort down to about 95 degs and move it to my 2 primarys, ended up with about 8 gals total after the boil. Went to aeriate it and found one of my O2 bottles id empty:drunk: . Must not have shut it all the way off when I used it last, luckly I had a spare.

Didn't bother taking a SG reading, I know my efficiency sucked.

Went down to check this morning and both airlocks are singing away happily.
I guess I made beer:mug:
 
Better weekend than I had - 90% of mine, it seems, was spent in the office!

Hey, at least the J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS! got their asses handed to them yesterday. Oops, that prolly doesn't help, does it? ;)
 
Agh, after all that, you can't even give us an efficiency reading?! Come on! You might have excellent efficiency...you never know!

Do yourself a favor: go get a corded drill. Or a DeWalt cordless XRP 14.4v or 18v. Worth it. But everyone should have a corded drill hanging around.
 
3rd the corded back up drill! But at least you made beer right? Any day that ends with more beer in carboys than you began with is a good day in my book, unless your dog dies the same day then it may not be a good day.

Cheers
 
I was thinking about the corded drill as I was trying to get milled. I do have one but it's a real old one and I don't still have the key to tighten the chuck. I'm gonna look for a cheep-o one this weekend when we have our village wide garage sale.


Oh and bird, bite me
 
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