New Homebrewing System - Initial Run

After adding the new mash tun to my brewing equipment arsenal, I was finally ready to break it all in with a brewing session. I chose to brew an all grain version of the partial extract Full Sail Ale Clone I brewed recently. This will give me a good basis of comparison.

For this batch I decided I would make yeast starter for each of my five gallon batches. However 90% through the process I realized I did not have the appropriate size bungs for my one gallon jugs. Since I had already pitched the yeast into the starter, I had to think fast. I remembered hearing of a trick, using balloons as an airlock. I had a bag lying around so I washed, sanitized, and turned the balloons inside out and attached them to the top of the jugs. This worked pretty well and definitely did the job of preventing pressure explosion and preventing cross contamination. The next afternoon the balloons where very full, visually showing the yeast starter was a success.

On brew day, I enlisted the help of a couple of my brewing friends to assist me in the process. And I'm glad I did, definitely helped to have an extra set of hands helping haul the full brew pot and mash tun around. In the course of brewing I found that my cheap digital thermometer was inaccurate, off as much as +20°. Fortunately the thermometer on my brew pot was accurate.

I chose to batch sparge for my first all grain on this system, and it seemed to work out just fine. In the future I may try to fly sparge, but for that I think a rectangular mash tun would work better, so as not to upset the grain bed.

After boiling the bittering & aroma hops, and cooling the wort with an immersion coil, we leveled out the wort into two 6 gallon carboys. I lost more liquid in the process then I thought. Starting off with 7 gallons in the brew pot, adding 4 more for the mash, ended up with about 6 gallons of wort. I boiled more water and topped each carboy off at the 5 gallon mark. Even though one of my buddies tried to talk me into loading it all into 1 carboy and going imperial style.

In all a successful brewing day. I now have 10 gallons of Amber Ale in primary next to my recently brewed Mocha Java Stout. I found some bugs in my new all grain system that I'll quickly work out before I brew again.

DIY - Mash Tun

Upgrading my brewing setup from 5gal to 10gal batches requires that I also create a 10gal mash tun. Following the advice of one of my fellow home brewers, I followed these instructions to build mine. The project was very simple, requiring a quick trip to Home Depot and 10 minutes of assembly time. Can't wait to put this to good use on my next batch of homebrew!

Brewing Weekend

Due to being oncall for work this past weekend, I spent a lot of time confined to the house waiting for my work cell to blow up. I found a local homebrew shop close to my house so I decided to drop in and see what they had to offer. I was pleased to find a few avid friendly helpful homebrewers working the place, much better then some other stores that staff a bunch of beer snobs. After talking with the staff for a bit I picked up a few sets of ingredients, and went home to brew. I ended up brewing a Full Snail Ale and an Oktoberfest.

Brewing takes most of the day and provides a lot of waiting for boils. As such, I decided to double up on projects and film the process. Watch the rough edit of the film:



YouTube Version

Beer Brewing

I finally had some free time in my schedule so I went to brew some beer with my friends this weekend. We brewed a partial mash IPA, and my all grain America Hefeweizen. I decided to bring my video camera equipment along and do some video work as well. We had a great time and I'm very excited to start brewing more regularly. We'll see how much time I can devote to it between all my other projects.

I was astonished by the active fermentation occurring in my beer tonight. So much in fact that I shot, edited, and published a quick video showing it off. Check it out! For those of you unfamiliar with the brewing process, the particulate is a very natural part of the brewing process. It all settles to the bottom of the carboy at the end of primary fermentation and is filtered out upon transport to secondary. In this batch we used whirfloc (a coagulant/clearing agent), so the particulate is a bit more pronounced at this stage then normal (esp due to the light color of Hefeweizen).



YouTube Version

Zymurgist in Training

I've wanted to get into home brewing for a while. The influence of my many home brewing friends has only increased my desire. I had plans to start last year, and brew some hard cider to hand out for the holidays. So I finally cracked and went out and bought a home brew kit, and decided to brew that hard cider for this holiday season. I shopped around for the best starter cider I could. I was disappointed in the organic, all natural ciders available at the local specialty markets. So I decided to go to the source, and purchased apple cider from the apple orchard near my house. I compared many cider recipes online and in some home brewing handbooks. Eventually found one that came with good reviews. Two weeks ago I prepped the cider and set it up to begin fermenting. I checked on the cider regularly and last Thu it was ready to bottle. Darci and I took a couple hours to bottle all the cider up and clean the equipment. Over the weekend I shared the cider with some friends/family, and got good reviews. The cider will improve with age, so it'll be very exciting to see how it matures. Darci and I are going to make some custom labels for the bottled cider and start handing it out in a few weeks. I'm very excited. I finished reading "The Complete Joy of Home brewing 3rd Ed.". Seems to be a great book on brewing, covering basic through advance home brewing techniques. My brewing friends claim the book to be a great resource. Based off that I decided to start working through the book, starting with brewing a batch of beer utilizing a beer kit. I picked up two Coopers beer kits from my local home brew store: a Dark Ale, and a Bavarian Lager. I'm very excited at the low cost involved with brewing from these kits. At $12 per kit, plus an extra $3 for the necessary corn sugar, it runs approx $0.28/12 beer ($15.00 / (640 oz./12 oz.) = $0.28125). I plan to brew up these two kits sometime this week. A few weeks later they'll be ready to tasting. If I keep up a regular brewing routine, it might be time to invest in some cornelius kegs and build a kegorator.