#brew system

Flub, stumble, trip, learn, and try again.

In Brewing Better Beer, Gorden Strong emphasizes the importance of knowing all of the intricacies your own system.  He couches much of his advice in qualifying statements about the type of system that one is brewing on.  He seems to think it is really really important.

So, of course, I ignored his advice.  I guess I didn't think my system was sophisticated enough to hide very many secrets.  I mash my grains in a bag, I boil, I add hops, I chill, I ferment.  What's to learn?

Turns out there's a lot of things to which I should have been paying attention.  The first two batches (a Belgian Strong ale and a Saison) in my new brew kettle didn't work out as I had hoped they would.  What's really frustrating is that I didn't learn from the first batch and made essentially the same mistake on my second.

In both batches I missed my anticipated original gravity by a significant margin, mostly because my wort volume was way high.  I used Brewer's Friend's default calculations for grain absorption and boil off rates.  The problems with this are that 1) I squeeze all the water possible out of my grain bag and 2) with the bigger brew kettle, I can't get as vigorous of a boil.   Both of these things lead to me ending up with much more wort than I expected, which in turn leads to weaker beers.

The Belgian Golden Strong Ale was supposed to end up around 1.072, but it was 1.053 instead.  I dual fermented this with Wyeast's Belgian Golden Ale strain along with a Brett Brux strain that I got from Chad Yakobson at Crooked Stave.  This beer filled my house with heavenly smells during the vigorous part of the fermentation process.  I can only hope that it ends up tasting half as good as it smelled.  Even with a 1.053 OG, the brett should consume pretty much all of the sugars in the wort, so I'll likely end up with a moderately strong belgian golden beer.  Just not an actual Belgian Golden Strong Ale.

My second go of the same mistake was a saison which ended up at 1.042 instead of 1.052.  I figured that making a smaller batch would help me reach a better boil, and thus alter the low boil-off rate.  I did get a much better boil, but the evaporation rate stayed at about 3 quarts per hour. This is being fermented with the Wyeast Belgian Saison (dupont, I believe) strain at 90 degrees.  It feels really really strange fermenting a beer this hot, but I wanted to get as much of the saison character out of the yeast as I could.  With the lower OG, this might turn into a nice tart, fruity, spicy, sessionable beer.

Since Brent left me all of his brewing equipment, I have made next to no changes in the system. My boil kettle was 14 qts. which means all my five gallon batches have been either partial mash (using the Brew in a Bag technique) or extract + steeped grains. The only way I was able to do all grain batches was to do batches of 2.5 gallons or less.

This system was working just fine for me, and I didn't really have any plans to change it.

On an apparent tangent, every time I visited Amazon, the site took great pains to tell me that I could now use my Discover travel miles to buy things on Amazon. Whoop-de-doo. Who cares?

Well I certainly didn't care, at least not until the moment that I realized that I could buy homebrewing equipment on Amazon. The realization that I suddenly had three hundred and fifty "free" dollars to upgrade my brew system made me stop and think about what I liked about my system and what I wish I could change.  Any changes I made would also have to be suitable to small apartment living/brewing, which is what we'll be doing if we move to NYC. Also, I didn't want to spend any "real" money, so the budget was firm.

Within these constraints, I identified the two biggest annoyances in my current brew system.

I couldn't do full boils and all grain for 5 gallon batches, and

My chilling system was incredibly inefficient.

So I decided to use my free money to change these things.

First I wanted to buy a kettle that is big enough to let me do full boils.  I ended up with this.

This is an 8 gallon kettle with weldless thermometer and ball valve attachments.  I might have been a little better off with a 9 or 10 gallon kettle, but I decided that 8 was the right size for the right price.  I also am really excited about the valve and thermometer attachments.  The thermometer will allow me to keep track of the temperature during the mashes without taking off the lid, and the valve will allow me to transfer the beer out of the kettle without lifting/tipping 5+ gallons of wort along with the stainless steel kettle.

So!  A kettle that can do a full boil?  Check!

Next on the list:  a more efficient chilling system.  Brent had a 25 ft copper immersion chiller, but it could only hook up to my hose.  Chilling even 3 gallons of wort would take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour.  And it wasted a TON of water.  So I went ahead and splurged a little on this:

This is a 50ft immersion chiller made out of 3/8" copper tubing.  It is twice as long as the one I had, which should chill the wort twice as fast.

But my chilling problem was not quite solved.  Again, the faucet in my sink doens't fit the standard immersion chiller hookup, and I also wanted to be able to prechill the water before it went into the chiller to maximize the heat transfer and minimize cooling time.  After a little bit of research, I decided this was the final piece to the puzzle:

What's this little guy, you ask?  This is a small submersible water pump, typically used in yard water features and things of that sort.  But I jerry rigged it to pump into my immersion chiller, which allows me to pump from a bucket of ice water through the chiller, quickly and efficiently cooling the boiling wort.

I boiled 5-6 gallons of water to test the system out, and I was very pleased with the results.

I was able to chill the water from boiling to 70 degrees in a little over 20 minutes.  I'm chilling 5-6 gallons of liquid in a third of the time it took me to chill 2.5 gallons before.  That's a win in my book.