Los Angeles Brewers

We brewed A Kolsch and a blonde on father’s day. The experience could not be more different between the two brews.

We actually measured our grains twice when putting together the mash. We missed our mash temp by a few degrees and had to infuse and decoct to bring it up to target.

The end result was an “Imperial Kolsch” with an original gravity of 15 brix (1.060 vs a hoped for 1.042)

The blond was a bit too hot into the mash tun but a little extra cold water fixed it immediately. It sat in the mash tun for longer than our 60 minute recipe as it waited for the Kolsch to finish it’s 90 minute boil.

The blond hit our OG target perfectly. Odd that we would have 88% efficiency in our first beer and a normal 73% on the second.

We also added another wrinkle to our operation: automated hot side aerator recirculation manifold. This addition is hoped to help in extraction of sugars and setting a good grain bed.

We also used FermCap-S in the boil kettle and in the plastic fermenters. We had two vigorous boils and no foam over. This stuff works. We are hoping it will reduce cleaning effort with the better bottle product as well.

Our 20 gallon output was split 4 ways into the fermenters with one each getting some brewer’s Clarex enzyme. This is supposed to reduce chill haze and is known to reduce gluten too.   We are hoping to have some gluten intolerant friends test this for us. We will send samples to White Labs to measure the gluten levels first.

Double batch days are about 50% longer than a single day, which seems like a very good payback. We were a little tired after the 11 hour day, but not as tired as our propane tank. It got a bit frosty before we depleted it.

We brewed a batch of Berliner Weisse. It was a fairly straightforward affair with the only glitch being an OG miss of for points. 1.031 vs.  target of 1.035.

We also took delivery of a 5 gallon whisky barrel. Some of our barleywine will find a home here.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.