Spring Cleaning
The sun is starting to come out here in California….finally! This is probably something that should have been done before heading out and brewing in front of a bunch of strangers, but better late then never right? It started with just running cleaner and sanitizer through all the keggles, lines, carboys, and empty kegs. However , it is embarrassing to say our mash/lauter tun has had some nasty burnt crusties on it since we purchased it used last year. A new high pressure hose nozzle and elbow grease got most of that crap off.
For the guys who came out for our event, you all know that we had problems with our PG&E thermostat regulators which control the flame on our hot liquor tank. Dean and Xon tinkered with the internals and were finally able to get the flame from a pretty looking candle to cinching your freakin eyebrows off.
At our brewday, we also discovered an efficiency problem we were having with higher gravity brews missing their mark. When we attempted an imperial porter, we missed our gravity points by more then I care to admit. Will over at Jack’s shared a common problem he had with sparging too quickly killing the efficiency mostly due to the sparge water finding a common path through the grain bed and missing out on all those precious sugars. We slowed everything from the lauter to the sparge way down to a snails pace. We probably doubled the time it takes to lauter/sparge the batch, if not more. In the end, we were hoping for a target gravity of 1.048 and ended up hitting 1.064! Needless to say we’re still dialing in the brewing sculpture to our liking with all of our batches, but it’s nice to see the dial move to a higher efficiency for a change.
On another note, the Double IPA from our SF Beer Week Homebrewing Demonstration was kegged and Dean is getting it carbonated up this week. We tried out two different yeasts with this batch, a California Ale and a California Ale V. The samples of both are leaning towards the California Ale being a crisper beer which allowed the brilliance of the hop profile to come through. But we’ll reserve our judgement until we try them both chilled and carbed up. If you’re interested in trying some, leave us a comment here and we’ll work on arranging getting you over to try some.
Posted on March 6th, 2010 by tsmith
1 Comment
I’m interested in trying some.