it feels like ages since our last brew day in november, so at the beginning of the week when the weather man started talking about saturday being unusually warm and the only sunny day all week, my interest was piqued. i thought it was too good to be true, but as i checked each day they were consistently saying the same thing: warm and sunny on saturday, rain the rest of the week. by thurdsay it was decided: saturday would be the first brew day of 2006!

for a while now i’ve been curious to try a solo brew day. so far all the brewing i’ve done had been with one or more of the other biergotter guys, but i figured at some point the time would come when i’d want to brew a batch and nobody else was available. so i figured i’d try my luck with a single 5 gallon batch. with most of our equipment stored at my place, i had everything i knew i’d be set in that department. i’ve got a small stock of grain, so i figured i’d have just about everything i’d need for a batch of this size. i had a bit of hops, but not enough to really do anything with. yeast would be a problem, but i could make a run to the wine and beer factory and see what they had in stock. i know they usually stock Wyeast liquid yeast, and worst case i could always grab some dry yeast and give that a whirl. we usually use White Labs liquid yeast, but i’ve heard many great reviews of the Wyeast stuff from the guys in the homebrew forum on Beer Advocate.

when i arrived at the shop thursday evening the (new) owner was very apologetic because his yeast selection was limited, and the most recent stuff had expiry dates of nov 30th, 2005. however, he said he’d give me a discount because of this. i flipped through the selection and was able to find two packages of wyeast 1968, London ESB ale yeast, both with the nov 30th expiration. i knew the rule of thumb for Wyeast was to allow an extra day of swelling for each month past the expiration date, but since i was planning to brew on saturday i didn’t want to take a chance of having a dud. so i bought both packages and he only charged me for one! great deal. i grabbed some hops and a pound of carapils and headed for home.

when i got home i smacked both packs (making sure that the nutrient pouch had burst) and stuck them in the pocket of my sweatshirt to incubate. within a couple hours they were visibly swelling, and by the time i went to bed they were both about an inch thick. when i woke up friday morning it looked like they were going to burst at any moment, so i quickly boiled up some DME, cooled it, and pitched both packs in. i gave it a really good shake to make sure it was aerated well. no turning back now! after work i got the garage setup for brew day and went to bed early, excited for the brew day.

saturday morning i woke up around 8:30am, grabbed some breakfast, and headed outside to get started at about 9:30. it felt odd only weighing out a total of 8.5 pounds of grain, especially after stuff like our imperial stout that was 45 pounds for a 10 gallon batch (about triple the size of this one). oh yeah, this batch is an attempt at a “small” beer, an english pale ale that should finish at about 4% ABV. In the last 6 month we’ve done lots of “big” beers (high gravity/high alcohol). we did try an english bitter in october, but we weren’t all that happy with how it turned out. it was ok, especially considering it was basically “free” (second runnings from our DIPA), but with it being about half DME it just didn’t have the malt backbone to stand up at that gravity. This time it was all grain, with Maris Otter as the base malt, so i figured it’d be alot better off. Also used an english yeast rather than the more generic White Labs California Ale yeast, which should make a big difference.

overall the day went pretty smoothly. no real problems to report. hit all my temps ok. probably the biggest “problem” was that i hit 85% efficiency, so instead of being around 1.043ish it ended up being 1.050. i had accounted for it still being in the same area if i got as high as 80% efficiency (which we have on several occasions), but hitting 85% threw it off a bit. oh well, worse things could happen…

so by 5pm i was done with cleanup and the wort had been aerated and the yeast was pitched. hopefully it’ll be rockin’ along in no time.

on with the photos!

8.5 pounds of grain, crushed and ready.

after the first infusion (1qt per pound). time for the 30 min protein rest at 122F/50C.

after the second infusion (0.5qt per pound), i wasn’t quite up to the 150F i wanted for my mash, so i had to throw it on the heat to bring it up to temp.

checking the temp… not quite there yet.

stir stir stir. don’t want to overshoot my target temperature.

after the 1 hour sacch. rest, it’s time to bring it up to 170F for mash out.

here’s our bucket tun filled and ready for sparge. the bucket works great for up to a 15 pound grain bill, so it was more than enough to handle the 8.5 pounds for this batch. no need to use the cooler tun (which is in the background of this photo).

done with the vourlaf, so time to start collecting wort.

the usual tin foil top cover on the tun. poke some holes and you’ll be sure to avoid any channelling or over-compacting the grain bed.

now the pot is on for the boil. notice the pot and strainer for skimming the hot break as we approach the boil.

the pre-boil gravity sample, with a shiny new hydrometer. i put the old one in the sample, and about a second later i saw a stream of air bubbles coming up from the bottom of the hydrometer. i quickly pulled it out and noticed a small crack in the bottom. fortunately, jenn was nice enough to run over to the local wine shop and grab me a new hydrometer while i monitored the boiling wort. the hydrometer read 1.034 at 93F, which works out to 1.039. with 7 gallons of wort collected, that means i hit 85% efficiency. nice!

wort chiller in action.

the nicely cooled wort going into the carboy.

the carboy down in the basement after a minute of pure oxygen. that’ll make the yeast nice and happy.

speaking of yeast, here’s the stars of the show. i decanted off most of the spent starter wort this afternoon, then took about a quart of wort from the pot and boiled it for about 15min, then cooled it and added it to the starter. by pitching time the yeast was happy and ready to conquer some wort, even if it’s a small one.

here’s the beer-in-training after aeration and pitching the starter. it’s got lots of headspace, but i fitted it with a blowoff tube anyway.

so there it is. my first solo brew day was a success. lets hope the resulting beer turns out well!

Yesterday was another brew day for the biergotter crew, and an interesting one it was. The day got off to a bit of a rocky start. we were planning to get started around 9am, and at 8:30 i got a call from Rob. he had slept through his alarm and was still in waterloo (approx 2 hours away), so he was going to be late. since he was picking Tim up on the way, that left Jayc and i to get things rolling in their absence. with two batches planned for the day, we knew it was going to be a long one. jay and i finalized the details of the recipes for the day while watching friday’s episode of aqua teen hunger force, and started to work.

as it turned out, tim and rob got to within 5min of my house, but got stopped by a parade. apparently i was smack in the middle of the parade route that bounded the major roads in all 4 directions. by the time they managed to get through that and find there way to my place they were nearly 3 hours late. we told rob that the moral of the story was to wake up when the alarm went off so that you didn’t hit the parade, but he was still unhappy :)

by that point we had the first batch, a Rochefort 10 clone, well underway. unfortunately, since we were kept kind of busy with this we didn’t really start working on the other batch, a badass imperial stout, until after rob and tim arrived. we finished grinding the grain for the stout around 2pm. by this point the Rochefort was mostly finished, so we were free to focus our attention on this batch.

for the stout we had big ideas. until now we’ve been limited to a 30 pound maximum for our grain bill due to the size of our cooler tun. this works out great for 5 gallon batches, but is limiting when working on a 10 gallon batch of something with high gravity. we’ve used sugar and dry malt extract in the past to boost up gravity, but this time we wanted to do it purely with grain. we also have an older smaller tun in a bucket that holds about 15 pounds of grain, so we decided to go for a 45 pound batch and just use both tuns. we figured the easiest way to do this was to treat the beer as two separate batches, splitting the grain bill so that 2/3 of the pale malt went into each batch, and then just split up the specialty grains between them. we decided that to give the impy a little more body and malty character we would use the smaller 15# batch and mash it higher. we also thought that instead of just running both tuns into the kettle it would be more exciting to do it “doble” style, running the liquor from the “high” tun down into the “low” one (see photos below).

the grain bill was split so the “low” mash was 21# of 2 row along with the brown, biscuit, and victory malts (total 30#). the “high” mash was the remaining 10.5# of 2 row and the chocolate, black patent, crystal, and roasted barley. the “low” batch was mashed at 152F, the “high” batch at 158F. The runnings from the “high” mash flowed into the “low” mash. sparge water was added to the “high” mash and it worked its way down into the “low” tun. about 14.75 gallons of wort at a gravity of 1.083 was collected. At this point the runnings from the “low” tun were still fairly high, so we gathered an additional 2 gallons of wort at a gravity of 1.050. The extra 2 gallons was boiled down until less than 0.5 gallon remained. we tried to take a gravity of this “magic elixer” and found that our hydrometer only went up to 1.170. At 120F, that works out to 1.180, so we know it was at least that. we took 1 quart of this and added it to the main wort at flameout. even with a 90 min boil on the wort we only boild off about 2 gallons, which yielded 12 gallons going into primary, with the remaining gallon donated to the beer gods…

Everyone brought beer to sample. on hand were our most recent ipa (brewed in september), our scottish ale (brewed in june), zywiec porter, bell’s 20th anniversary ale, dark horse crooked tree ipa (which makes me think of pavement), ommegang hennepin ale, stoudt’s double ipa, stoudt’s fat dog imperial oatmeal stout, and stoudt’s scarlet lady ale esb. an interesting mix of beer that we all enjoyed.

lots of new records for us today:
-latest brew day (nov 26)
-coldest brew day (-3C)
-longest brew day (9am-2am)
-largest grain bill (45#)
-highest gravity all grain (1.100)
-highest yearly brew total (~75 gallons)

on with the photos…

yes, it’s winter here in the toronto area, with several inches of snow falling over the last few days. it was fairly cold (slightly below freezing), but there was no wind so the weather wasn’t too bad for brewing. first infusion of water for the Rochefort heating up on the burner.

jay grinding the grain for the rochefort clone.

the 15# grain bill waiting for its first infusion.

i overshot the temp on the first infusion, so took advantage of the cold weather to help cool it down. this wasn’t happening quite fast enough so i ended up pulling a couple quarts and replacing it with cold water. this brought us right where we wanted. this was our coldest brew day, and because the grain and equipment was all pretty cold we had to adjust for this, going with slightly higher temps for each infusion in order to make sure we hit the correct temperature. the protein rests were fine, but we needed some heating to bring us up to saccharification temps. we also had to keep a closer eye on our temperatures, giving a bit of heat around 40 minutes into the sacc. rest.

the bag of maris otter waiting for use in the stout. our usual 2-row is a bit thin and unexciting, so we decided to find some maris otter for this batch. as it turned out, it’s even cheaper than what we’re currently useing. we have to head over to detroit to get it, but considering most of us end up in windsor fairly regularly that’s not a problem. we’ll be using alot more of this in the future.

heating up the rochefort to mash out temperature.

jay stirring the pot, and the arrival of rob (on the left) and tim (right).

we didn’t waste any time putting them to work. here’s rob working on the grind for the stout. can you tell he’s injoying it?

here’s the rochefort approaching boil and tim skimming the skum.

the grain for the stout, crushed and ready. the “low” one on the left, and the “high” on the right.

the rochefort in full boil.

tim checking the temps for one of the first infusion on the stout.

we moved the burners into the garage to help keep us warm. my burner is right inside as it doesn’t get nearly as hot as jay’s jet burner. we kept his closer to the door as it gets pretty hot.

rob’s really excited about the stout. here you see him checking on them. sort of looks like he’s trying to guard them from everyone else and keep them for himself…

mmmm…tasty. can you tell which one has all the roasted grains?

chiller ready for action. had to bring the hoses in the house for a while to thaw them out before we could do this. then we left the chiller sitting out for a few hours and it turned into a rock, so we had to bring it inside to thaw out too.

the tuns setup and waiting. the “high” tun was also elevated with respect to the “low” one, so it’s more than just mash temp.

mashing out on the “low” pot.

the tuns filled and waiting. check out how black the flow from the “high” tun is.

yep, light isn’t even getting through it. hopefully the final product will be this impressive!

that’s me (russ) dumping the last of the mash into the cooler.

jay prepping the tinfoil on top of the ‘high’ tun. think he’s having fun?

the runnings from the “high” tun quickly turned the “low” one black.

tasty hot black liquor.

can’t get enough pics of this setup. the flow from the “high” tun stayed super black all the way to the end, and it didn’t take long before the “low” tun looked the same.

tim on skimming duty again. we had to be really careful with this one as it’s the fullest we’ve ever pushed our kettle. at just shy of 15 gallons, there wasn’t much headspace if it decided to boil over. fortunately after skimming most of the hot break we didn’t have much trouble.

by the time we got the imperial stout up to a boil it was after 10pm. it’d been dark for hours, and especially with the steam we had to use a flashlight to see what we were doing. here we see jay helping tim see the skum for skimming.

this is the pot of what we were calling the “magic elixer”. the final 2 gallons of runnings were put on to boil, and probably spent about 2 hours boiling while the main wort got up to and ran its 90 minute boil. the result was under a half gallon of super sweet liquor. it tasted alot like molasses, with strong hints of caramel and licorice.

we decided to use a quart of the elixer, adding it to the main wort at flame out.

frost on the propane tank…think it was cold?

so when the day was done it was 2am and we had 12 gallons of imperial stout and 6 gallons of our rochefort 10 clone. all were aerated with oxygen and a 0.5micron stone for about a minute, then again after 10 and 14 hours. the plan is to dissolve a pound of candi sugar and add it to the primary after a few days, then add the second pound a few days later.

stay tuned for fermentation photos…

update: nov 28/2005, 8:30pm

just took some photos of the fermentataion, and they’re both looking great!

this is the rochefort clone. it’s in an extra-large carboy, so there’s plenty of head space. even so, there’s a serious layer of krausen on top.

damn that impy looks fine. it’s blowing off like mad and making a mess in the pot. good use for the aluminum pot that came with my “turkey fryer” burner.

another brew day for the biergotter crew. this time around it was our “club seasonal”, a spiced imperial porter for the holidays. on hand for today’s festivities were tim, jayc, jayw, eric, and me (russ). Tim’s brother-in-law also dropped by for a bit to observe the magic that is all grain brewing.

we had a keg of our mild english bitter on tap for the day. This kept things interesting as the hops kept clogging up the works. we’d fill a pitcher until it came to a stop, then reverse the disconnects so we could “blow out” the outlet with co2, and keep going until it clogged again. by the time we got half way down the keg it was pretty much stuck and there wasn’t much we could do to get it moving. so we popped the keg open and just poured it through a strainer and into pitchers. it was supposed to be lightly carbonated, so this worked out ok. next time we’ll be sure to bag the hops before adding to the keg…small oversight in our first attempt at keg hopping.

with several of the biergotter crew at halloween parties the night before, tim and i volunteered to get things started early and let the other guys arrive a bit later. unfortunately, due to commitments with the Kitchener-Waterloo Little Theatre rob wasn’t able to join us for the day. he’s been pretty busy with the theatre rebuild project and hasn’t been able to take part in much brewing lately, but he tells us that he’ll soon be rejoining us for some brewing fun. we still managed to arrange a time when jayw would be up visiting from windsor, so we went ahead with everyone else.

on to the photos!

“wheezy”, the biergotter dog. actually, her name is nico, but she does wheeze alot. she mostly just layed around in the sun, but did try to take on several dogs approximately 20 times her size. fortunately we kept an eye on her and didn’t let her get into too much trouble.

stirring up the mash to make sure the temp is up to saccharification temp of 155-156F.

jayc stirring the mash, eric drinking some of the bitter, jayw in his fine pirate hat also sampling the bitter, and tim striking a pose.

stir stir stir. still using a wood broomstick while we continue to search for a nice stainless paddle.

bringing the kettle up to 170F for mash out. pretty excellent color. guess that’s what you get with a pound of black patent and a pound and a half of chocolate malt…

after vorlauf we started to collect some wonderfully black porter. well, i guess at this point it’s still just “porter in training”.

the tun full of 31 pounds of grainy goodness. that’s jayc in the background keeping an eye on the flow.

still going. we got pretty close to a stuck sparge on this one. we had the flow going nice and slow, but it was gradually getting slower. even running wide open it was slowing to a trickle. we checked and found that the grain bed had really compacted down, so we stopped the sparge and gently stirred the mash, careful not to knock the manifold out. after another quick vorlauf we got it going again. it continued to flow slowly, but it was steady so we let it go. eventually we had 14 gallons of sweet tasty wort at a pre-boil gravity of 1.071.

standing around and waiting for the sparge. it took eric 5 tries to get a decent photo, but eventually he managed this one. from left to right we have tim, jayc, me (russ), and jayw. yar.

time to fire up the burner and get the boil going.

jayc skimming the hot break and eric showing off the bitter.

yay skum skimmin’. since we started doing this we’ve never had a boil over. highly recommended!

half way through the boil. can see the deep brown/green color of the head and first hop addition.

the jays. in case you were wondering, jayw was wearing the fine pirate hat from the costume that he wore to a halloween party the night before. he went as a priest from the church of the flying spagetti monster, wearing the appropriate full pirate regalia. he didn’t go to bed until 4am, and then after a daylight savings mishap was awake at 7am. he was feeling a little rough, so we just kept filling him with bitter.

since it today is halloween we had some candy and party favours (prepared by jenn) on hand for the brew day. this one shows jayc trying out his new flashlight. oooh, frightening cat!

jayw had a frightening glowing red bat.

ooohh! scary!

jay with the bat, tim with his red skull necklace.

eric also testing out his flashlight. i think there’s supposed to be two visible flashlights showing cats, but it’s pretty hard to see…

eric enjoyed the bitter a little too much. i suppose it didn’t help that we kept telling everyone who wasn’t driving that they needed to finish the keg before they could leave. by the end of the night we were taking bets that he was going to be sick in jayc’s car on the way home…

so the day went pretty smoothly, and when all was cleaned up we had about 11 gallons of 1.077 wort, lightly spiced and going into fermentation with two huge starters of white labs irish ale yeast. we’re hoping to have half of this in bottles, and the other half on tap for new years eve!

24 hour update…

the two DIPA‘s at the 24 hour mark. fermenting away happily.

the mild english bitter. still slow, but it’s going…

beers we brewed up a couple weeks ago. the barleywine on the left still chugging along, and IPA on the right.

now we see the the bitter at the 48 hour mark, foaming all over and making a mess. after a little dry hopping with some fuggles, this one will be on tap when we brew our club seasonal oct 30th.

the two double IPAs fermenting up a storm.

barleywine and ipa still happy.

brew day number two at my new house. on tap this time was a double IPA that we planned to pitch onto the yeast cake from the IPA that we brewed two weeks ago. since we were doing a big beer we decided to see what we could pull off for a second batch, even if it was only 5 gallons. we figured that a nice mild english bitter was a good choice.

before we got too far into the day, we had to transfer the IPA into secondary. we brewed this batch almost entirely for the yeast cake so we’d have lots of nice, happy yeasties to work on the DIPA. this was the first batch (along with the barleywine) that we used both a starter and oxygenated, and we were quite happy with the results. The IPA started out at 1.065 and was down to 1.015. our last couple batches didn’t seem to go below 1.022, and when we primed and bottled we had some issues with overcarbonation. we feel pretty confident that after a little time in secondary (with an oz of cascade pellets) it’ll be hoppy and happy and ready to drink.

we also decided to move the barleywine to secondary. the gravity on it had dropped from 1.106 down to 1.055 and was still bubbling about once every 5 seconds, however there was a serious amount of trub at the bottom of the carboy so we wanted to move it. we did make sure to pull a bit of extra yeast and stuff from the bottom of the carboy, just to make sure it’d keep going. we threw a bit of yeast from the ipa in too, just to make sure it’d be happy. we know this one will spend a while in secondary, but we want to make sure it will continue to ferment.

oh yeah, did i mention that they were great? after taking gravities we sampled both beers. the IPA was fantastic (probably our best yet), and the barleywine, while it still has a lot of sweetness, was baddass and tasty as hell. really looking forward to seeing this one finish fermenting, and then how it’ll change with a little aging. both jay and i agreed that it was pretty darn good even without any aging. eric, you missed out on sampling these, but i’m sure you’ll enjoy that next time.

with the transfers out of the way, we got back to the brewing. Here for today’s session were me (Russ), Tim, and JayC. we also had the extra adventure that I needed to run out and pick Jenn up at the airport at 1:30, just when things would be starting to get interesting. that normally wouldn’t have been a problem, but earlier this week tim said that he’d have to leave early to meet up with his dad, so he wouldn’t be able to stay past 2:30. that would work out ok if everything went smootly at the airport and on the highway, but if the flight was delayed or traffic was bad we didn’t want jay stuck alone with two boiling worts. well, once today came tim said he’d be able to stay until i got back (even if it took a while), so we weren’t too worried. as it turned out, the flight was early, customs was a breeze, and the highway was dead, so there was no problem. we still waited to start the DIPA heating, just to be on the safe side and to stagger the time for the two batches finishing.

only took a few photos today, but here they are. enjoy!

tim (aka the brew monkey) working on cleaning up the keg kettle.

30 pounds of grain, crushed and ready for use. I crushed everything up and measured out the water for the protein and saccrification rests last night so it’d be ready to start when everyone arrived.

tim working on a new manifold for the cooler tun. a few of the pieces were a bit long, so he had to trim some of them.

scrub that pot, brew monkey!

mmmmmm….damn that looks good. smelled pretty fantastic too. after trying out the munich malt on the barleywine we were really excited to use it again. even with only a couple pounds you can notice it.

and it’s already running clear…

hops all lined up and ready for addition. FWH, 90, 60, 45, 30, 20, 15, 10, 5, and 0. dry hops too, but they didn’t make it in the picture.

keep cleaning, brewmonkey! see, tim was supposed to bring a carboy for our last brew day and forgot it, so he had to work extra hard today. of course, he had to leave early so he missed out on most of the cleanup. he’ll have to make up for that on our next session: a spiced imperial porter as our ‘club seasonal’ at the end of october.

jay re-adding the first runnings back into the tun.

after we’d collected 12 gallons for the DIPA, we pulled off another 4 gallons of wort with a gravity of 1.018, so we decided to add a little light DME, throw in some fuggles and kent goldings, and call it an english bitter. gotta love getting the “free batch” with the leftovers. we just used a little of the yeast cake from the IPA and tossed it into this one (there was plenty!)

mmm…double ipa goodness.

the spent grain bed. we had tim squeeze all the liquid out of it so it wouldn’t be so heavy for disposal.

the bitter cooling off.

the badass DIPA. this sucker just kept trying to boil over. it was an angry brew, and had a serious band of hops on the sides when the 90 min boil was done.

the grains ready for recycling. last brew day i threw it all into one bag, and we didn’t really bother getting the last of the water out, so it was pretty heavy. apparently the garbage men agreed, because they didn’t take it. a few days later i had the fun task of opening the bag and splitting it into a few bags that would be easier to lift. not making that mistake again. three smaller bags, around 20lbs each, so they’ll be gone monday morning.

the fermentation corner in the basement. clockwise from the left we have the barleywine and the IPA from our last brew day, then the two carboys of DIPA from today, and finally the bitter. I was short an airlock, so we just stuck it in this rubbermaid bin until i can get an airlock or blowoff on monday. could be interesting, but this should contain the mess. I also learned from the last bunch and put the blowoffs inside the pot to contain their mess.

so with tim leaving early, the end of the day took a while. even once the beer was cooled and in the carboy we were still running around finishing cleanup and stuff. by the time we were done it had been just shy of an 11 hour day, but the weather was great, and we’ll have another 15gal of excellent beer to show for it.

yesterday saw a few of us getting together for another brew day, our first since june 12th. this was to be the first time brewing at our new house in markham, and our first session with our newest biergotter member, eric. jay met eric through beer advocate and invited him to come out for the day. eric started homebrewing last year doing partial mash and extract brewing, so this was his first experience with all-grain.

on tap for the day was a barleywine and an ipa. the barleywine is something i’d been talking about for a while and wanted to take a stab at. the ipa was being brewed mostly to create a big, healthy yeast cake so that we can brew a double IPA in a couple weeks. we decided that since the malt bill would be similar for both batches we’d try to pull both batches from a single mash, then beef up the barleywine as necessary to give it a more respectable gravity. not wanting the IPA to end up too weak from this, we decided to collect 14 gallons and split this into two 7 gallon batches. A little tinkering with promash and we had a barleywine that would have an initial gravity of 1.106 and an IPA with an initial gravity of 1.065. we ended up with some great efficiency and had a pre-boil gravity of 1.065 for both.

here’s some photos from the day…

getting setup for the day.

eric working on grinding our grain, and jayc making sure all goes well.

my new ‘turkey fryer’ burner on the left, jay’s tried-and-true burner on the right.

mmmmm, grain. 30min protein rest after first infusion.

closer look

starting to fill the tun you can just barely see the mike dixon-style manifold in the bottom. lots of great stuff on his webpage.

jay loading up the mash tun.

hmmm…30 pounds of grain seems to be the limit for our tun. maybe it’s time to move up to one of these?

jay and eric checking the first runnings…running clean in no time!

here’s the bag of demerara sugar that i picked up friday. thought it’d be interesting to throw in the barleywine.

yay, promash!

jay topping up the tun with more water.

eric admiring some of the hops for these two batches (and the upcoming double ipa). mostly he was just posing for a photo to use in his profile.

he’s still in awe over this whole all-grain thing…

great color…and the barleywine should get a bit darker with the DME and dark demerara.

both batches ready for the boil (ipa in the pot, barleywine in the converted keg).

wow, that’s alot of spent grain. we tried to use some to make a loaf of bread, but it didn’t turn out that great. too wet, and kind of brick-like.

the biergotter ladies observing the works. jenn wasn’t too interested in a photo, but i took one anyway ;)

the mountain of grain ready to be recycled. here in markham we do ‘green bin’ orgaincs recycling. until i have a place to compost the spent grains, this will work great. hopefully it’s not too heavy when they come to pick it up in the morning.

eric skimming the skum (well, rinsing the skimmer at this point).

hmmm…maybe jay isn’t enjoying the photo journal either…

transferring the barleywine into the carboy. there was so much hop matter in the carboy that we initially tried straining it out, but the process was slow and painful. looked more like there was alot of cold break than hop matter. after while we just gave up and ran it straight in. it’s going to be fermenting for a while, so there should be plenty of time for it to all settle out.

look! a blurry photo of a propane tank! perhaps i should have edited this one out…

yeah, we’re happy with the way this one was looking.

that’s me happily watching my first barleywine filling the carboy. we sampled a bit of this going in and we’re really looking forward to trying it done. we brought both batches inside, oxygenated, and pitched a starter of white labs california ale yeast.

so the day went pretty well. no major problems (except for tim forgetting to bring us a second carboy to ferment the second batch in…luckily there’s a wine shop nearby that was still open). definitely looking forward to brewing more batches here. we’ve got the double ipa scheduled for oct 1st, and have already started talking about a couple more batches we’d like to see before christmas. stay tuned for more brewing news in the future.

24 hour update:

well, it’s now over 24 hours after the yeast was pitched. i went downstairs to check on them at about the 24 hour mark and was greeted to a great site. both beers are fermenting like mad, with the blow offs overflowing. the barleywine was actually creating quite a mess, as you can see by the trickle leading towards the drain in my basement.

the ipa

and the barleywine.

bet you can’t tell which bottle was the blow off for which beer…

hops and such are already starting to settle from the barleywine.

i knew there’d be a good use for the aluminum pot that came with my burner…hopefully this won’t get filled…

It’s been a while since there was a brewing session at Biergotter West (JayW’s place in Windsor). Our last brew day in Windsor was dedicated to fruit beers and the results were fantastic. The pineapple ale was a big hit, the apple ale was nicely balanced, and the raspberry porter was quite tart and tasty.

Anyhow, JayW and I (JayC) had been throwing around the idea of doing rye beers for a while. We even tried a couple of times in the past, but the flaked rye that we used previously just didn’t give us the result we were looking for. On a previous trip over to Kuhnhenn, we got a look in the attached BOP and HBS shop and saw a giant tub of malted rye, exactly what we needed.

We found a weekend that would work for both of us (Labour Day weekend) and started making plans. I had just picked up Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher (great book) and gotten the idea of trying a parti-gyle batch to get a small volume of high gravity beer and large volume of lower gravity beer. Seemed like a good idea, since we’d only need to mash/sparge once and get beer for both of us. The recipe we formulated called for a lot of rye, about 20% of the grist. We had also been planning to make mead at some point, so this seemed like as good a time as any.

So I packed up the car and headed down to Windsor on Friday. On the way, I stopped in at an apiary just north of Leamington and grabbed a bucket full of fresh clover honey. Smelled great. Brew day was Saturday, but unfortunately that was our first opportunity to go to the HBS shop. We headed out in the morning to cross the border and grab supplies. The shop attached to Kuhnhenn was spectacular. They had everything we needed at the best prices we’ve ever found. Tons of malt and hops, a wide variety of yeast, all tasting and smelling fresh (or at least stored well). The staff was helpful and steered us clear of some needless worry when dealing with rye (rice hulls are often suggested to avoid a stuck run-off, but when he heard our method, he said we didn’t need to worry).

We left the shop with everything we needed for the day’s brewing, as well as hops and yeast for a future Toronto brew day, and headed next door for a pint. After all the shopping, we deserved it, and Kuhnhenn never disappoints. Except for today when they had no beer bottled for off-premise sale. Oh well. So we headed up the street and grabbed a couple six-packs of Michigan micros.

Anyways, we got back to Windsor and started crushing grain (sorry, no pictures). This took a while, so we didn’t get the mash started until almost 4pm. Crap, it was going to be a long day. Mashing was going well, but at the end of the saccharification rest the wort didn’t taste quite as sweet as it should. An iodine test confirmed that it wasn’t quite done, so we heated it up again and let it sit for another 30 minutes. That was all it needed, so it was time to start sparging.

Meanwhile, we pasteurized the honey to prepare the mead, two 5 gallon batches (a still and a sparkling if everything works out). It really didn’t take long and as the honey/water mixture heated, it gave us a chance to skim coagulated proteins off the top. These went in the carboys, yeast nutrient was added, and yeast was pitched later in the day.

Back to the beer. So we pulled off about 4 gallons of wort for the barleywine and then continued collecting for the rye beer. We nearly hit gravity on the barleywine (only had to add 1/2# of DME) and overshot on the rye beer. Not bad for a first attempt at the parti-gyle method. Things went quite smoothly from here, but it was getting quite late. By the time the beer was boiled, cooled, and put into carboys, it was after 11pm. We took a short break to run downtown to Phog Lounge and then returned to oxygenate and pitch the yeast. There was no time for a starter, since the yeast was purchased earlier in the day, but we’ve had good results before with White Labs yeast in this situation. There was a little clean-up at this point, but not much. I think we gave up at about 2am.

The next morning we finished cleaning the garage and packed up the car, and then I headed back to Toronto. From JayW’s updates, it sounds like fermentation was quite vigourous. It was a fun day of brewing, using new methods and new ingredients. What kind of insanity will be next? IPA/DIPA combo…

This past sunday the biergotter gang got together for another brewing session, our first using our shiny new 15 gallon converted keg kettles. on the menu for the day was a re-vamp of our last american style ipa, updated for 10 gallons and more aggressive hopping, and a 10 gallon scottish ale.

the day started off ok. everyone arrived at tim’s at 9am and we started getting setup. it was fairly warm and quite humid, but overcast with bursts of light rain. i commented that it’d be great if that was the weather we got for the rest of the day as the slight rain was counteracting the heat. however, soon after this the clouds cleared and the great fiery ball of death began to beat down on us. before long tim’s back yard was starting to feel like an oven. it seems like the stone patio just reflects and radiates the heat, making it worse. at one point around the middle of the day I looked at our thermometer as it was laying on the railing of the deck and it was reading 122F (50C). in case you are unaware, that translates to “really fucking hot”. add in the approximately 89% humidity and it was deadly. fortunately we had 4 brewers (me, rob, jayc, and tim) to split the work, so before long we were taking turns with having breaks in the air conditioned house for some relief. we also had the biergotter wives (jenn, piera and erin) making sure we had sunscreen on and were drinking lots of water. even so, it was difficult to stay hydrated, and even wearing sunblock i still managed to get burned. i was wearing sandals and didn’t put sunblock on my feet until it was too late, so today has been pretty uncomfortable. my arms and neck are a bit tender, but nowhere near as bad as my feet. this is the second time i’ve had a burn on my feet (the first was in hawaii on my honeymoon) and it really sucks some serious ass. i definitely do not recommend it. oh well, hopefully they’ll be feeling better in a couple days.

as for the brewing itself, it went fairly well. we’ve gone up from doing 5 gallon batches to 10-11 gallons (with a maximum capacity of about 30 pounds of grain per batch using our current equipment). the new kettles worked great and even seemed to have improved things in a few ways. first, because they heat slower it seems to be easier to get the temperature just right for boiling and avoid boil overs. second, the inner lip on the top made it super easy to cover with saran wrap while chilling the beer. normally we have to tape the saran down to the sides of the pot, which can be a pain to remove later. tucking the saran around the lip seemed to work great and no tape was necessary. we also used bags for the hops rather than throwing them directly into the boil. This worked pretty well and also gave us a bit higher yield as we didn’t lose quite as much when transferring to the primary. however, the higher volumes too longer to get up to temperature, which made the day a bit longer. we also ran into a bit of trouble with our wort chiller. we’re used to using it in a pot that is roughly the same size as the coil, which works fairly well. however, when we dropped it down into the keg kettle it didn’t seem to be working very well. we’d test the temperature near the top of the kettle and see it as very high, and not seeming to drop. after about an hour we realized that the bottom half of the keg was very cold and the top half was still quite hot. since the pot wasn’t being stirred the top wasn’t getting cold. we propped up the chiller so that it was sitting in the top half of the the keg, gave it another half hour or so and everything was great. when it came time to chill the second batch we did roughly the same thing, which worked fairly well but is still much slower than when we’d chill the 5 gallon batches. we’re debating better cooling, either with a chiller that is taller and can go the full height of the keg or buying/building a counter flow chiller (something like this one sold by paddock). we’ve got a while before our next bewing session so i’m sure we’ll figure something out.

when we were finally done it had been more than a 10 hour day (9am to 7:15pm), yielding about 10 gallons of the american style ipa and 8 or 9 gallons of the scottish ale. lets hope the beer is worth our scorching by the great fiery ball of death.

we were taking photos throughout the day, but they tapered off as we started getting deadly hot. enjoy!

the lauder tun and it’s inner copper piping and one of the converted kegs.

burners and the other keg kettle, ready to go.

mmmm….29.5# of grain goodness. this was the grain for the IPA.

getting the first batch of water up to temp.

more water on the burner.

protein rest for the ipa, and everyone enjoying the (still cool) morning. we have (from left to rigth) rob, piera, jenn, and tim.

jayc…

me (russ) adding the second batch of water for the IPA and jayc taking stirring duties.

jay checking temperatures.

no idea what i was doing here…

rob hard at work grinding grain for the scottish ale.

checking temps on the ipa. jay’s having a fun time with stirring: note the bend on the spoon in the second photo. we’re going to see about getting a nice stainless one.

the boys doing some fine poses.

jenn and piera making up some potato salad for lunch (it was tasty!).

checking the temp for the first batch of water for the scottish ale.

adding the first batch of water for the scottish ale. note me cleverly bracing the keg with my foot. good thing that the guys have good aim…

time to stir. at this point we were still smiling…it wasn’t too hot yet.

second batch of water for the scottish ale.

getting the scottish ale up to temp

bit of a gap in the photos…this is rob loading up the tun for the ipa.

me keeping an eye on the scottish ale

mmm…grainy goodness. you can see that the 29.5 pounds of grian in the ipa pretty much fills our current tun.

the ipa on for the boil. you can sort of see the coat hanger all bent up and hanging over the top. that’s holding the hop bags, making it easier for us to pull them out for the additions along the way.

couple photos of the thermometer in the afternoon. still registering over 100F…

the IPA cooling…

scottish ale on for the boil. around this point we stopped bothering wtih the camera altogether. it was just too damn hot and we were more concerned with not baking in the sun and getting the beer done.