Inagural Brew

Calibration Ale is bubbling away in the fermenter this morning and I'm tired. It was a long day yesterday and I still have an acid rinse to run today. I started the brewday about 8:30 am by firing up the boiler to heat the water. I was apprehensive because we've been having trouble with getting the boiler to run consistently, but it ran fine all day.

Calibration Ale is an amber ale made with Pale malt, some Vienna malt and Caramel 80. It's hopped with Cluster, Mt Hood and Amarillo at the end. We mashed in around 10 am and the initial temperature was a little low at 147, so we added 20 more gallons of hot water and got it up to 150. We had some problems with the recirculation because the pump was creating too much suction under the grain bed and the false bottom sections got buckled a bit. It's all about getting to know your system. The sparge took over an hour but that's good because it led to some pretty good efficiency.

We got up to boil at 1:35 pm and all in all the boil went well except for the minor boilover. I figured out that once we are up to a rolling boil I can turn off the bottom steam jacket and still maintain a good rolling boil without danger of boiling over. The Amarillo got added after the steam was turned off so we didn't boil away that great aroma. After about 15 minutes of whirlpooling it was off to the fermenter.

I put together this contraption that attaches to the heat exchanger that has a thermometer, sight glass and a valve that allows us to inject yeast and oxygen directly into the wort stream.
This enables us to chill, pitch yeast, oxygenate and transfer to the fermenter all in one shot. It all worked perfectly except for the fact that we ran out of oxygen one third of the way through the transfer. We decided to add some last minute yeast nutrient to make up for the lack of O2. It seemed to work because it's bubbling away this morning.

I was expecting a starting gravity of 1.044 and was very surprised to see the hydrometer floating at about the 50 mark. There was a lot of trub in the sample so I let it settle for about an hour and checked it again. 1.053. Almost 10 points better than I predicted so I'm obviously pretty happy with the efficiency of this system, even if it was a complete pain to put it all together.

The whole point of brewing this beer was to get a sense of how this system works (hence the Calibration) and still create a good beer and not be concerned about style. Not that I ever am. I'll have to wait until it's done fermenting to get a sense of hop utilization and aroma characteristics and that will be the subject of my next post.