We finally got around to brewing an Oktoberfest. Given our modern yeasts and highly modified malts, we should be okay with the timing (but probably should have done this at least a month ago).
We used 23 lbs of malt including a bunch of Vienna as base two other malts that I can’t remember, some caramel 80, a pound of wheat and two pounds of candi sugar (one light and one dark).
The mash was thinner than our usual at 1.7 quarts per pound and we got complicated again with the schedule. Originally designed to infuse at 143, decoct to 155 and then sparge at 168, we ended up with a double infusion and double decoction, We ended up with an intermediate rest at 149 (our decoction calculator failed us).
We hit our original gravity (1.055) exactly. Our ground water was 76 degrees and our Blichmann therminator brought our wort to 78 degrees with a very fast pump.
Pretty good brew day (except for our mash miss).
One bummer, however. One of our California Lager fermenters got infected with Chlorophenols. Bad-aid flavor was painful to taste. It was the Kolsch yeast fermenter that went bad. Perhaps we failed somewhere in washing the yeast, cleaning the fermenter or blow-off valve, or some other task. This is the second beer in the past couple of months, and third all time, that has been infected in this way. Time to focus on these issues.
Los Angeles Brewers 