I made 10 gallons of "1-hop" IPA from a recipe provided by another Star City member; I had tried it at his house and was impressed with the clean simplicity of it. His one hop was Amarillo, and I am doing mine with German Perle.
As you can see, it was a beautiful day to be outside brewing. The children were also outside, pulling frost-zapped flowers and cleaning up the remains of the summer flowers and tomatoes.
The recipe for 10 gallons has 21 pounds of Maris Otter pale malt, a pound of Crystal 40, a half-pound of Crystal 60 and a handful of chocolate malt. All this fit neatly in my tun with some room to spare. I could almost make 10 gallons of double IPA with this tun, it is so big.
I had a little trouble with the strike temperature this time, I think because I ran a little too much hot water into the tun before mashing in. But after adding about a quart of cool water the temp was at 153 and things settled in for an hour.
The rest of the session went like clockwork, although as a Florida-originating brewer I am still not used to how long it takes to boil 12 gallons of liquid when it's 50 degrees outside. I'm more used to brewing when it's 85. I need to get a lid for my kettle, I think, to contain some of that heat. Goodwill store here I come.
Also as a Florida brewer, I am not used to having such good water. My well there yielded very hard, mineral-rich water that imparted a definite flavor to the beer. Not so much with extract brews, but definitely when I used it to mash grain.
Here, however, my well water is acidic (pH of 6) and tastes delicious. We recently had a powdered-limestone neutralizer installed for the house, to keep the acid water from eroding our copper pipes in a few years, but when the guy did it I had him leave one of the outdoor faucets directly fed by the well, i.e. bypassing the neutralizer. So when I brew, I just guestimate and use half acidic water and half neutralized. The results have been excellent.
Anyway. Here are some close-ups of the operation. In this picture taken from low down, you can see the pump with its splash guard of aluminum flashing. The chiller is visible behind it, and I'll talk more about the fabrication of that later (it was the first piece of brewing equipment I made).
Note the camp stove with its little precision-bearing wheels, on its track. It is rolled into position under the kettle in this view.
The gizmo to the right is another result of Florida brewing. It's a water uptake hose. In 2004 and 2005 Florida had no shortage of tropical rain, and as an alternative to my stalactite-forming well water I started putting a carboy under the eaves of the house and collecting rainwater to brew with.
The beer flavor improved amazingly, but try lifting six or seven gallons of water and pouring it -- glug glug glug -- into your hot water tank.
So I built a special valve into my system, just before the pump, which could suck collected water up out of a carboy or bucket and into the system. The big problem was with all the water running back out of the uptake hose the moment the pump was shut off (or before it could be started), so I fashioned a check valve to put on the end of the dangling uptake hose. I cut the bottom off a White Labs yeast tube, cut a wide hole in the black plastic cap, stuck the soft rubber gasket from a swing-top beer bottle inside the perforated cap and dropped in a marble, generously donated by my son.
The result is a check valve that worked quite well, once I figured out the physics of how to prime it and get it started. When the pump came on, the hose would suck up water from a bucket and the marble would rattle around merrily. When the pump was cut off, the weight of the water in the hose would slam the marble down and seat it against the soft swing-top gasket, sealing off the hose and holding the solid column of water inside. The diameter of the White Labs tube just happened to be perfect to push onto the plastic hose I use on the BMW.
Sorry to take so long on that, but I was pretty proud of that little invention. You can sort of see it in the above photo. Now that I am using my garden hoses, though, it's pretty much superfluous.
I need to go. More about this brew session in the next post.
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