Brew Day - Done

Big brew day number two, done and dusted. Three brews done, I did an American Pale Ale, Brian did a Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter and we helped some guys pop their brewing cherries with a Munich lager kit.

 

We started with the Porter, since I forgot my recipe. Mashed in and we had a very full pot! I was a little worried the massive amount of chocolate malt wouldn't fit, but it did, just! I think the thick mash helped insulate everything, she held temp pretty well.

We started to sparge, pulled out the bag and a fair amount of wort over the side of the pot all over the nice clean garage floor. Queue stopping the sparge to clean up and moving outside! Back sparging and the nice Manawatu weather decided to rain, so we moved back into the shed. All in all, we sparged, gathered the wort and got it to a boil. The garage was smelling like a cross between a cereal factory and a coffee house!

 

Next was the Pale Ale. Mashed in on target, 64 degrees. This time the temp fluctuated more than the Porter, figured because the mash was fairly thin there wasn't much insulation, so I flamed on a couple of times to get the temp back up. The last 15mins of the mash I got sidetracked, so the mash ended up being a tad hotter than it should have been (sac rest perhaps), but we sparged and collected the wort and got the boil going.

I threw 140g of hops at it during the boil and 57g for a whirlpool addition, which I did, but didn't whirlpool since I used a hop bag I just left the hop bag in the wort while the chiller was running. I ended up with 19L of 1.079 wort, much higher than the 1.052 I was aiming for. IPA instead of an APA style wise. I'm ok with that though, I'm a fan of both! I still have a 57g addition of hops to dry hop with, but depending on how sweet it could still be at FG I may boost that up. We'll see in a week or so.

At the same time as the APA we got a boil on for the boys and their Munich Lager kit. The boil was simply 30L of water with 7g of Willamette for a little bittering. Removed from the boil at 20 to go and threw in the Munich Lager can, Amber LME and the brew enhancer pack, brought to a boil and boiled for 5 mins then chilled it.

 

Below are some random shots from the brew day and a picture of the Mystery German hops. Enjoy.

 

Massive grain bag being pulled out the mash tun

 

 Subsequent mess from the wort spilling

Recirculating, the cheats way

 





 Left over from the mash - black gold

 



Mystery German hop shoots