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.
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 added a Blickman autosparge to our mashtun. This feels a bit like overkill as we have had no problems with stuck mashes. We have not, however, really gotten into the nastier ingredients (oatmeal, wheat flakes,etc). Hopefully this will keep our mash experience pleasant when moving into new ingredients.
Brewed 10 gallons of Dunkelweiss. The efficiency seemed rather poor. Not sure what the problem is but we will look at mash temperatures and maybe ramp them up a bit.
Looking forward to trying this one.
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.
Los Angeles Brewers 