OK. So I got my brewday in last night. If I had to pick one word to describe it was: CHAOS
Recipe
- Pretty well matched the recipe bang on except I eyeballed the flaked wheat, and scaled up for a 10.5 gal recipe.
- ingredients were exactly as listed except for hops - did the same 15, 10, 5, 0 minute additions except then I hit a snag - more on that below.
Brew Steps
- mash went well. Initially was a bit high - so stirred until temp came down below 160. Then it really dropped. I really don't like my thermometer/setup. It seems to "stick" a lot especially in mashing. It'll read an initial temp - maybe the grain around it insulates it a bit and causes temp stratification within the mash tun (keggle)
- then temp went down to 145. I added some hot (180F) water to bring it up, when again I had the "stuck thermometer" issue. I used my Thermapen to confirm that the top of the tun (mostly water at this point) was 156 F and the bottom must have been what the temp dial read (1). Assuming it all worked out in the end - aiming for the listed 152F. This is one of my challenges with my setup.
- Then drained, batch sparged until I got final boil volume of 12.5 L - probably was a bit over (13.0?) as my BK was pretty full.
- SG before boil was only 1.035, which I considered low, so I decided to boil for 75-90 mins and test OG along the way.
- Boiled away and checked at 75 mins and OG was 1.062!!! Not sure if that is really what happened or if my initial reading was either off or low because wort was hot (?)
The Issue
- then I hit my big snag. for all of my hop additions I used muslin bags filled with either whole hops or pellets.
- My last hop addition I said to heck with it and added whole hops (1.0 oz) straight in. Problem is that I don't have a screen on the bottom of my BK just a dip tube.
- started to drain the wort and nothing happened. Got really pissed off, trying to unplug the jam using many techniques, most of which potentially infected the batch (we'll see). After about an hour of trying gravity feed, solar pump, and other techniques, I was resigned to cleaning my mash tun keggle, and transferring all the word from the BK into that so that I could run it through my blichmann plate chiller. By this time it was midnight and I was not a happy camper.
- from here on it things went well. I believe my final volume is right around 10 G into 2 fermenters. Although I have a real mess to clean up when I get home tonight, plus it's St. Paddys day so this probably isn't gonna get dealt with until tomorrow!
Fermentation
- running two split batches (5G each) both with Safale S-05. This morning there was action in one, and nothing in the other. Worried that one of the S-05 packages might have been dud. If there's no activity after 2 days.
Recipe
- Pretty well matched the recipe bang on except I eyeballed the flaked wheat, and scaled up for a 10.5 gal recipe.
- ingredients were exactly as listed except for hops - did the same 15, 10, 5, 0 minute additions except then I hit a snag - more on that below.
Brew Steps
- mash went well. Initially was a bit high - so stirred until temp came down below 160. Then it really dropped. I really don't like my thermometer/setup. It seems to "stick" a lot especially in mashing. It'll read an initial temp - maybe the grain around it insulates it a bit and causes temp stratification within the mash tun (keggle)
- then temp went down to 145. I added some hot (180F) water to bring it up, when again I had the "stuck thermometer" issue. I used my Thermapen to confirm that the top of the tun (mostly water at this point) was 156 F and the bottom must have been what the temp dial read (1). Assuming it all worked out in the end - aiming for the listed 152F. This is one of my challenges with my setup.
- Then drained, batch sparged until I got final boil volume of 12.5 L - probably was a bit over (13.0?) as my BK was pretty full.
- SG before boil was only 1.035, which I considered low, so I decided to boil for 75-90 mins and test OG along the way.
- Boiled away and checked at 75 mins and OG was 1.062!!! Not sure if that is really what happened or if my initial reading was either off or low because wort was hot (?)
The Issue
- then I hit my big snag. for all of my hop additions I used muslin bags filled with either whole hops or pellets.
- My last hop addition I said to heck with it and added whole hops (1.0 oz) straight in. Problem is that I don't have a screen on the bottom of my BK just a dip tube.
- started to drain the wort and nothing happened. Got really pissed off, trying to unplug the jam using many techniques, most of which potentially infected the batch (we'll see). After about an hour of trying gravity feed, solar pump, and other techniques, I was resigned to cleaning my mash tun keggle, and transferring all the word from the BK into that so that I could run it through my blichmann plate chiller. By this time it was midnight and I was not a happy camper.
- from here on it things went well. I believe my final volume is right around 10 G into 2 fermenters. Although I have a real mess to clean up when I get home tonight, plus it's St. Paddys day so this probably isn't gonna get dealt with until tomorrow!
Fermentation
- running two split batches (5G each) both with Safale S-05. This morning there was action in one, and nothing in the other. Worried that one of the S-05 packages might have been dud. If there's no activity after 2 days.