Los Angeles Brewers

Today we are brewing a pale ale and a clone of Ballast Point’s Sculpin IPA.

The pale ale went swimmingly, with absolutely no problems other than a pump issue.

The trouble from our pump #1 was a slow flow..  We took it apart and reassembled it as all looked good. It was sucking in air and we thought it was time to use the Oetiker clamps on our brew rig houses.

We mashed in a couple of degrees above our 148 target for the IPA but were able to get it down with some stirring and leaving the lid off.

We mashed in at the same time we did flame out on the pale ale.

We racked the pale on to our Kölsch yeast cakes (after racking the Kölsch into secondary fermenters) at 60 to 62 degrees.

Racking finished just as we needed the pump to begin our recirculation. We had to wait 10 minutes to clean the boil kettle and fly sparge. Nice 70 minute mash.

The 4 ounces of 60 minute hops are pictured above. Crystal, Magnum, Northern Brewer, Warrior and Columbus. that’s on top of an ounce of first wort hop.

While putting in the hops we checked gravity and found it short by 17 points! No idea how that happened, especially with a long mash, except that in this batch we did not add any 5.2. Weird.

Soon after, we had a boil over and lost a bunch of hop matter. Amateur move…

30 minute hops went fine, except we did not have enough crystal. We substituted a third of the weight with Northern Brewer.

We added some LME and DME at the 15 minute mark to bring the gravity up to target.

Flame out hops and into the fermenters it went. Long day.

We brewed a Kölsch again. Original recipe was used.  We missed our mash temp by 4 degrees and struggled to bring it up.  Otherwise our brew day was busy but non eventful.

We cleaned a bunch of kegs and the white freezer. One of our kegs had a leak on the liquid side and left an inch of beer in the freezer.

We bought an Oetiker crimp and are going to replace when clamps on our hoses.