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Monthly Archives: January 2013

Stirplate Number Two

We bought a second stirplate on ebay. Our homemade one did not perform as well as we had hoped. A bit of tuning and adjustments would make it work but the effort was too great and the loss of yeast would be too much if it threw the bar in the middle of the night.

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We sanded the pretty ragged body a bunch and then hit it with a good shot of Rustolium. The paint is the double coat version. This, allegedly, puts two coats on each time. It just sagged. While not super pretty, the new coat of paint will keep it from getting more corroded and keep the brewery clean. Plus it is orange. Orange rocks.

Stirplate Sereal Number

stirplate orange 1

stirplate orange 2

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2013 Kolsch

We brewed a Kolsch again. This time we did an all barley recipe. Half a pound of honey malt was used for color.

We did a two step infusion mash and hit our temperatures exactly. All was not perfect as we added all the hops at sixty minutes, including our 15 minute aroma addition. Whoops. We added another .75 ounces of cascade whole hops that were grown and frozen by us last year. The IBUs will be a touch out of style but will hopefully taste good.

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We also washed the Mexican lager yeast from last brew. We hope to store it for a while in order to use it again.

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Brad brewed up a batch of “craft” root beer too.

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Did you know that sarsaparilla is considered a carcinogen by the FDA?

Mexican American Vienna Lager

We have wanted to brew a Mexican lager for a while. We came up with a traditional Vienna Lager with some corn adjunct and pitched a Mexican lager yeast on 5 gallons and an American lager yeast on the other 5 gallons.

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This mash had three rest temperatures so two decoctions were done. We used Beer Smith to calculate the volumes instead of doing it by hand and we overshot our targets both times. We added some cool sparge water and were able to quickly get to target. We will need to dial in the mash tun calculations in the Beer Smith program.

We also did a fly sparge and used our nifty manifold.

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We got a few more points of gravity than we planned for, so we will need to dial in the Beer Smith program some more.