Successful IPA brew day

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ultra_cas

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I just wanted to share a fun, successful brew day. Had a recipe all planned out for Sunday, got a nice early start. My plan for the mash – I’ve never done a mash out, heard it’s not really necessary, but often thought about it, so planned on reducing my sparge water by 1 gallon, and take that extra gallon and bring it to about 185, and pull about a gallon from the mash after 1 hour, and also bring to 185. I then dumped that in to the mash to raise the temp for a mash-out. When I was getting ready fly sparge, I was missing a clamp so couldn’t attach the hose, so in the spur of the moment, switched to batch sparge, which I’d never done. After a quick online search, I proceeded and pulled/recirculated the vorlauf, drained the mash tun, added 2/3 of my sparge water and let it sit for 10 minutes. Put my first runnings on the burner to start bringing to temp.

After the 10 minutes, another vorlauf, drained the mash tun and added the remainder of my sparge water, and put the “second runnings” to the boil kettle. Let it sit for 10 minutes, pulled off 1 gallon to reach my boil volume and added to the boil kettle.

Hit my target gravity, it was actually a little higher than expected. One boil hop addition, then a big whirlpool addition of Citra, Mosaic, Nelson Sauvin, and an experimental hop from UVM which smells similar to Citra, which smelled awesome when added. Really optimistic for this IPA, fermenting away now at 65 with Wyeast 1318 London Ale III, will add 1st dry hop at the tail end of fermentation. I’ve always added the dry hop once fermentation was complete, but doing another first with this one and adding during the final stages of fermentation. This is also my first time using RO water (I have a source for free RO water through our local market), and doing water additions to try and tackle water chemistry. Maybe the name of this beer should be “String of Firsts IPA”.

I did forget and the fermentation chamber was reading ambient temp from last night until this morning, probably 20 hours. Taped the temp probe to the side of the fermenter with a little insulation over it to better monitor fermentation temps, saw the temp jump to 67 or so when I did this, but still fine and within good fermentation parameters for this yeast. Now the waiting game…
 
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