Date: 15 Nov 2006 13:33:42
From: Bart Goddard
Subject: Brew day from heck
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It wasn't horrible, but it was a bit tough. It started Sunday
when my window for buying ingredients was suddenly and sharply
narrowed. Rather than put together sensible recipes, I grabbed
a book of the shelf and copied a couple down, making only
minor modifications, but not really thinking.
One batch was a big Scottish Ale. The total grain bill was
33 lbs. (For 10 gal.) I didn't realize this because there
was a lb of this and a lb of that. But these additions add up.
I learned the following fact about 10 years ago: The mash
tun will not hold 36 lbs of grain. Yesterday (Tuesday) I
learned that it will also not hold 33 lbs. The purpose of
this post is to report how I dealt with this:
The mash tun is a 10 gallon Gott. I put what I could in
there and had 3 or 4 lbs of grain left over. I have a
small SS pot left over from extract days and I put the
rest of the grain in there and ran mash water into it. I
mashed for about 2 hours (I had to let my cigar finish)
and started sparging the main tun. After a bit, I took
my strainer and scooped up some grain from the main tun
and ran the sparge water directly through it (sort of
power-sparging) and then pitched that grain. When I
had created enough room, I added the lesser tun to the
top and continued sparging. I had about 13 gallons in
my converted keg boiler.
I'm pretty sure my efficiency wasn't very close to 70%,
but with that much grain, it didn't matter to me.
I tried, for the first time, some Foam Control. It sure
does get rid of the foam, but I had a boil over anyway.
But I didn't have to fight too hard to keep things under
control. OG was 86. I set up the carboys with blow-off
tubes with the ends in one-gallon bucket. This morning
there was blow-off all over the kitchen floor. When I
get home from work today, I expect a second mess on the
kitchen floor.
Next batch: Oktoberfest with only 23 lbs.
Bart
--
The man without a .sig
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