Way to make me more nervous then i already am. What mistakes did you make so i can learn?
Sorry Smurfwar! I didn't see your response until now
I sent Jlaskey a list of my screw ups so I'll copy/paste them here:
...today was a day of complete eff ups for me:
- I did end up using the amount of water mentioned. But I trusted my "towel" surrounding my pot WAY too much and mashed by hitting 165, dropping the grains in and walking away - bottling a different batch while that was mashing (I needed the primary
)
- Coming back to the pot at the end of the time, I checked the temp
and it was 140. well, that was a waste of 2 row.
- I filled my pot to just over 5 gallons with water from the fridge (filtered) so it cooled it to 94 or so. I decided to take a gravity reading and only hit 1.050! And that was after adding the 3lbs of DME.
- So, I added 2lbs of table sugar and that brought gravity to 1.060.
- Then I realized, I completely forgot the Caraaroma. REALLY?!!!
- I had my son fill the pot to it's usual level from the fridge water while I heated up a half gallon of water to steep the Caraaroma in for 30 minutes. I knew it would take at least that long to get the full pot to a boil.
- Pot on burner, I added the caraaroma steepage and ended up with basically 7 gallons..maybe even 7.25 or .5....
- To counter all that I ended up boiling for 15 or 17 minutes just to evaporate some of the wort and waited to start my official 60 minutes with the first hop addition.
- In the end, I hit around 5.75 gallons or so (little less) with a gravity @ 1.068 @ 84 degrees.
What a frickin' brew day.
With all that said, however, I just hit the 3 week point yesterday and racked onto the oak this morning. Aside from some of the tweaks I made this time around to the recipe (different fruit 'n stuff), it all seems to be working out pretty well! The SG reading was at 1.004 @ 76 degrees so that currently pegs me at 8.1% which is what I had on my first batch. That was a surprise!
I fermented high though due to temps here locally. Basically between 73-76 almost for the entire primary. The taste from they hydro sample before racking was awesome which was another surprise. Also, side note, I used washed yeast from the WLP060 on the last batch of this - not sure how much that affects the "blend" portion of the strain but it seemed to work OK for me.
If you haven't made it yet, GOOD LUCK! (watch that pot temp close if you're doing it the same as I did!)