Los Angeles Brewers

Today we brewed a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone. The recipe was pulled from the Northern Brewer forum. The beer is for our friend John’s party next month. He joined us on Brew day.

We bought a couple of thermometers from Target.com and only one arrived. We wished it had not.

This thing worked great for our first batch of the day. Good accuracy. You could set timers and temperature alarms. It lit up as well as beeped when you hit your desired temp or time. It stopped working as we brought the first batch up to boil.

As you can see the temperature got stuck (at 210 degrees) it slowly went down but stopped at 165 degrees where it sits more than a week later. Time to get a new solution to temperature monitoring.

We brewed two 5 gallon batches, the “Black Widow Porter” and the “Hoppiness is an IPA” recipes from the excellent book “Brewing Classic Styles.”

We made a few changes to the brewery since our previous (first) batch. The wiring was redone to bring the switches away from the pumps. The crimp clamps on the hoses were replaced with worm screw hose clamps. The frame was also hit with an awesome orange high temp paint.

We finally got around to kegging our first whole grain brew. Pretty simple, as we both have done it dozens of times with our extract based beers. This time, however, we had the beer chilled to 40 degrees. This got the carbonation going quickly, so we were able to sample the brew within a couple of hours. It was good.

Time to brew some more!

We have fermentation!

We were able to put the fermenters into their new home and call it a night.  We will keg them in approximately three weeks.

We finally had the pump priming thing figured out and we were able to pump into the fermenters, pitch yeast and airlock in no time at all.

We had an easier time getting the mash into the boil kettle.  The pump did not want to start (switch issue) but once we got it going, it pumped strong.  We used a hop bag in order to not test our false bottom.  The false bottoms worked very well, however.

Okay, we got our Hot Liquor Tank filled with 12 gallons and heated to 170 degrees.  We fired up the pump to move it into the Mash Tun and had major problems.  The pump kept losing it’s prime and our fancy quick disconnects were leaking at the hose connection.  We lost a lot of water and what we did get into the tun was not at a good temperature.

We removed the crimps from the hose, and that seems to have fixed the problem of leaking.  We heated up some more water and got it to go finally, but we mashed about 10 degrees lower than we were aiming for.

We have purchased ingredients for our first all grain brew day!!!   Now we have to finish the brewery.   Looking forward to it.