Los Angeles Brewers

Today we brewed 10 gallons of Blonde Ale, somewhat duplicating one of our best beers yet.

We pitched an American Ale yeast on one half. We used a dry yeast for the first time. The other half is fermenting with a Belgian Ale yeast.

Me missed our mashing temperature again. This time by only two degrees. We did a small decoction to bring the temp back up and mashed for an extra 15 minutes. I think our efficiency was better than 70% (according to Beer Tools Pro).

All went well, except a small miscalculation had us using half the hops called for in the recipe. We may dry hop to bring up the hop flavor or we may just leave it. We will figure it out after we taste it before kegging.

We brewed two seasonal ales, a Christmas and a Pumpkin. Our brew day began at 5:00pm on a Friday and ended at 2:00am on Saturday morning. The long hours, late night and a few beers each conspired to mess us up.

We missed our mash temps by a lot. Our thermometers were all wrong, the pumpkin absorbing heat and a lack of attention all added up to less than 50% efficiency on one of the beers and less than 60% on the other.

Lots of lessons learned.

We kegged the Blonde Ale (no pictures, sorry).

SG: 1.101 or alcohol of 6.02%. A bit out of style. Color and flavor are spot on, however. Will be really good when properly cold and carbonated.

We also measured and marked the carboys. We have been over filling the big ones and under filling the small. We have two 5 gals, one 6.5 gal, and one 7.5 gal. We also have another 6.5 gal that cracked. Funny how no two are the same.

Fridge now has 20 gallons in kegs. Actually ~18 as we have been sampling the SNPA clone.

The first resident of our new fridge is our two week old Sierra Nevada Pale Ale Clone (I think we need to come up with a better name for it).

We are dialing in the temperature and hope to get good results. We have other ideas for temperature control, but we may luck out with the stock thermostat.

I don’t know why I still get excited by active yeast. Maybe it was all those failed fermentations of my youth using the yeast packet taped to the bottom of the extract can.

White Labs rocks!

If only we had more room in the cooler. It would have been nice to have the Sierra Nevada clone fully finish fermenting while in the glass under lower temps.

Have we said we needed another freezer?

We had to keg our Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone in order to make room for our Blond Ale in the freezer. We need another refrigerator/freezer to do more than 10 gallons.

This weekend’s brew is 10 gallons of a blonde ale. We are using the recipe from the book “Brewing Classic Styles.”

This is another beer for John’s party.

One day later and the fermenters are active. Hoping to keg soon so we can do a blonde ale right away. We really need another chest freezer.

We were fortunate to have fresh, homegrown hops for this batch.

We were able to use a lot of our new equipment. We calibrated our sight glasses (from http://www.brewhardware.com/), dialed in the autosparge and tested the new thermometers.

The site glasses worked well. One did not seal well with the thermometer, but we were able to wrap a few extra rounds of Teflon tape around it and stop the leak.

One of our analog thermometers read too low by 12 degrees and one of the new digitals was DOA (hoping it is only a dead battery).

The autosparge worked well for the re-circulation and for the early parts of the sparging but, eventually, you need to empty the mash tun and this is only accomplished by turning off the filling pump.