October brewing

Aaaaaand...we're back. The hot weather finally broke and I can now think and move coherently enough to get a brew day going. I finally got a makeshift grain mill hopper together that works reasonably well; it holds about 2 kilos comfortably and doesn't let all that much grain slip out the sides. Well, it must be pretty good as I measured 84.5% mash efficiency the other day. More on that, but here's the hopper:

Dennis Hopper

I made it out of a sawed-off shochu bottle. For those who don't know that's a kind of cheap hooch like vodka that old geezers like to drink. It's held in place in the hole in the wood by a cuff cut from this dense foam rubber that you usually find on hand-grips like on a bike or exercise equipment. Works really well. It took 5 to 10 minutes to get through 6 kilos of grain. Man my shoulder was sore the next day too, so I'm getting some exercise out of it at no extra charge.

For the season's first brew I decided to do this mongrel IPA that I put together out of grains and hops that I've had sitting in the fridge for a while, in odd quantities, that I just wanted to get rid of before they went bad. I call it M&A Mongrel IPA. (Original, I know.) That's me doing a fly sparge there. I started with a batch sparge for the first one, but it was running so slow, I rigged up the fly sparge thinking it would speed up the process, which it did. I got really good efficiency as well, like I mentioned. (Efficiency is how well/completely your grains convert their starch to fermentable sugars, which is dependent on things like the consistency of the grain crush, the temperature of the mash water, the duration of the mash, etc.) In batch sparging you just dump all this water in after mashing, stir it up and then drain it out. That rinses the grain of residual sugars, but as the grain bed tends to compact, it doesn't run off very fast sometimes. With a fly sparge you keep water flowing in the top at roughly the same rate you're draining out the bottom, so the grain is sort of floating as it's rinsing. I did this one as sort of an unplanned jerry rig operation, but since it seemed to work so well I'm going to plan it into my brew next time a little more intentionally. By the way that's a piece of tin foil resting on top of the grain bed. The water flows over that and through some holes that I poked in it, thereby distributing more or less evenly and avoiding 'channeling', or digging grooves into one or two spots in the grain bed, which reduces efficiency. There you have it. My mash.

27 liters

There's the result of a one hour mash and three sparges, 27 liters of pure wort gold. The foam on top is protein beginning to coagulate as the temperature rises to the boiling point. We skim that off. This boil was for 90 minutes. I wanted to get a little carmelization of the malts by boiling for this long. My IPA is pretty big at 1.077 (actually putting it into the Imperial IPA style category, but whatever), and I want that big bitterness to be offset by a good amount of carmelly sweetness. I further tried to smooth out the bitterness (60 IBU, not totally over the top, mind you), by adding my first hop addition late, at 45 minutes, and upping the quantity to arrive at the desired IBU count. I used Columbus and Magnum hops for bittering. Then I added 60 g of Cascade hops at 20 min, followed by another 30 g at 10 min, and a further 10 g at flame-out. I'll then dry hop it with Amarillo and Chinook hops after primary fermentation is done.

Nice rack

And here's my lovely assistant, Atsuko, managing the racking process, whereby the chilled wort is moved from the brew kettle to the fermenter, prior to pitching the yeast. I ended up with 22 L at the end of the boil, but only 16 got into the fermenter. Mysterious. I attribute a 4% volume loss to cooling, but that doesn't account for very much. The kettle has some dead space below the spigot, and the whole hops absorbed a gang of wort, so that has to be where the rest of it went. Damn. Gonna use pellet hops except for dry hopping from now on, especially for these hoppy IPAs. So now the beer is sitting at 18-19 C and bubbling away happily. The first day it blew up into the airlock and flooded the top of the fermenter a little, so I had to clean up that lil mess. I got a taste of it though, and it already tastes like beer: bitter, malty, slightly carbonated, intense young IPA. I'm always optimistic at this stage in the life of my beer, and this brew is no different. I know it's gonna be killer.