Rough Brewday

[Indytruks138]

Well, so far I hadn't really had a batch go wrong, no infections, everything has gone quite smoothly. Yesterday made up for that.

I have a brewpartner, and we also had another buddy over as our IPA was ready to drink in the kegerator and he wanted to try it. I had been out of town all weekend and somehow there is a bad leak in one of my kegs or CO2 lines as my 10 lb co2 tank that was 3/4 full on Thursday was empty and the kegs were flat. That was quite off-putting.

We had brewday going pretty strong however, small mistake in that we forgot to close the ball valve on the mashtun when we went to batch sparge, so I guess we got a little bit of a fly sparge.

When we went to start the boil, we ran out of propane, luckily we have a backup. However when we screwed the regulator to the backup I could hear and smell the propane leaking. We went and exchanged our first bottle and same thing, somehow the regulator went bad or we were doing something very wrong.

As our only backup we had to put the brew kettle on the grill and try do our boil that way. It took 2 hours to get up to 209 on the thermostat, never got to a vigorous boil, but we did an hour at 209 and got the boiloff we wanted, just no clue how this will turn out. It sounds minor but our 4.5 hour brewday turned into an 8 hour brewday.

 

[Jamming]

Don't know if this helps but i made a brew day check list just to prevent such a day. You might want to try it. After i started a brew day and relized i didnt make my starter. That was it, now i have a check list.

 

[Indytruks138]

Don't know if this helps but i made a brew day check list just to prevent such a day. You might want to try it. After i started a brew day and relized i didnt make my starter. That was it, now i have a check list.

I think this is a good idea but I'm not sure it would have helped us. We had the backup propane so we didn't really run out, it just seems the regulator broke, it worked fine to heat our mash and sparge water. And if my checklist was detailed enough to tell me to close the ball valve after draining first runnings it would be too detailed. Just stupid mistakes this time.

 

[william_shakes_beer]

It happens. Bet you don't forget again. I had the same thing happen as I began racking over to the bottling bucket. Now i ALWAYS check the valve.

 

[Nomad]

I spent six hours this Feb. trying to boil a batch on my stovetop when I underestimated the power it would take to bring my new 10 gallon pot to a boil. Finally split the batch and boiled for an hour. Other than the huge evaporation loss and higher OG the beer was fine and tasty! Don't worry and all that.