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Author Topic: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition  (Read 6351 times)

Offline euge

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #30 on: September 18, 2010, 02:00:00 am »
Was thinking alot about "Red Ale" but I think a Brown Porter would be appropriate based on my grain.

Chocolate and Roasted malt and Crystal 10. Too tired to mash will steep in pale DME.
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Offline tygo

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #31 on: September 18, 2010, 06:52:45 am »
Getting ready to mash in on the American barleywine I haven't been able to get to for a few weeks.  Used my new drill to grind 25 lbs of grain for it the other night.  I can't believe I didn't start doing that sooner.
Clint
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Offline tygo

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #32 on: September 18, 2010, 08:04:42 am »
And it all fit nicely in the mash tun with room to spare.  I could easily get another 5-10 lbs in there before it started slopping over the sides :D
Clint
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Offline jeffy

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #33 on: September 18, 2010, 09:45:06 am »
Brewing an Imperial Weizen with Amarillo hops Sunday.  Sort of like Brooklyn/Schneider  Hopfen-Weisse.
I have to keg the second 5 gallons of my German Pils, and transfer the Bock I made 2 weeks ago.  It's good to have homebrew!
Jeff Gladish, Tampa (989.3, 175.1 Apparent Rennarian)
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Offline kgs

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #34 on: September 18, 2010, 06:49:42 pm »
Remembered I needed to dry-hop my first "outdoor" brew, a rye IPA made in my new kettle on a propane stove on our deck. It's not terrible, but it's clearly too caramelized (boiled too long, boiled too hard). I am sure somehow I'll find a way to choke it down... and next time I'll have a better feel for quantities and boil time and strength.
K.G. Schneider
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Offline redbeerman

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #35 on: September 19, 2010, 03:50:11 pm »
Finally got to the helles tht I've been meaning to brew for the past three weeks.  Been working too much >:(.
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Offline phillamb168

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #36 on: September 20, 2010, 03:18:54 am »
Late to the game here, but I've just finished my first all-grain batch on my new HERMS system. The beer is a generic "festbier" ordered from a company in Germany that I won't be ordering from any more - bad quality. 10 pounds of a grain they didn't bother to identify, and a generic "yeast" packet. Lots learned from this brew, for sure. Namely:

First lesson: Mise en place is very important! The above mentioned yeast packet was nowhere to be found when I started racking to my primary. I had some (probably wayyyy expired) liquid yeast (the kind that comes in a plastic bag where the yeast and food are in two separate plastic baggies inside, and you have to punch it to get them to mix together), so I used that.

First question: Beer yeast isn't supposed to smell like bread yeast, right? It's been a while since I last brewed and I can't remember.

Second lesson: garden hoses in Europe (and the US too, I guess? Been a while since I used one) now come with checkvalves on the ends of the hose so they don't output any water unless there's a nozzle attached. I hooked up my counterflow chiller to the house's water supply (high pressure) and coupled it to the garden hose with some 1/2" vinyl high-temperature (UNREINFORCED) tubing. I turned the water on full and looked down to check for leaks, and I say to myself, "Hey, I don't remember putting PVC piping in here... Oh, wait a second, that's not right... Oh, s*** I better turn off the *BOOM*. Water everywhere but thankfully not in anything already sanitized. I went upstairs to change my shoes, pants and socks (this is why they have no-pants brewing I guess?) and came back and put the nozzle on.

Second question: I know temperatures vary for sparging depending on the type of beer you're going for, but does 30 min @ 50 deg c/30 min @ 67-70 deg c/30 min sound about right, with a mash out at 77 deg c?

Third question: I didn't have a hopback or anything to filter the hop particulate from going into my counterflow chiller (and my March 809), so there almost certainly were hops that got into the lines. 1. Is this a problem? I ran high-pressure water through everything this morning and it's running clean now, but I don't want to have burned out the motor. 2. As I was running the wort through the chiller, it was barely streaming. The pump wasn't used at the time, so I switched out the lines and had it run through the pump after the chiller to get things pumping a bit better. This helped, but what was weird was how the wort was coming out. There'd be no wort for a while, and then the whole system would go "WhummMMMM" and a big squirt of wort would pass through. Is this because of the hops in the chiller, or because I really really need to put the pump between the boiler and the chiller, as opposed to boiler -> chiller -> pump?

Fourth question: Got everything done, finally, and pitched my questionable yeast. This morning I got up to check for fermentation and there's nothing going on. How long do I wait before I assume it's a dead batch?

Thanks guys - hope you all had a better go of it than I did, but then again I learned a LOT!
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Offline jeffy

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #37 on: September 20, 2010, 06:48:43 pm »
Nothing.  BJCP Exam on Saturday.  :-X
So how do you think you did on the test?  Was this your first attempt?
Jeff Gladish, Tampa (989.3, 175.1 Apparent Rennarian)
Homebrewing since 1990
AHA member since 1991, now a lifetime member
BJCP judge since 1995

Offline phillamb168

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #38 on: September 21, 2010, 03:05:27 am »
Update: we have fermentation! Woo! OG was at 1.030, which means it'll be a bit weak, but I'll be happy if my first all-grain is drinkable.
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Offline wamille

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Re: What's Brewing This Weekend - 9/17 Edition
« Reply #39 on: September 21, 2010, 05:16:59 am »
I'm brewing my SN Celebration Ale clone this weekend.  It's one of my favorite beers in the world - just enough maltiness to go with a great hop bitterness and aroma.  I might also make add some darker malts to the SN Celebration Ale clone grist to come up with something different... a dark IPA?... so (possibly) a two brew weekend.  I'll need it to deal with all the crap beer here in South Korea, aka, BEER HELL!!!