ionia ales

I made some beer last tuesday, at home,  for the first time in ages.

Everything went pretty damn well.  Using the pump to chill the wort speeds up the end quite a bit! and no heavy lifting of boiling wort.  I have been using a similar S.S. mesh as found in my mash tun, – on my boil kettle, to keep hop crap out of the plate chiller.  This has been working well, but i lose up to 1.5 gallons in my kettle with the trub.   So I either need to count on losing that, or need to change something.  Possibly finishing with Whole hops will help filter out some stuff, but will absorb wort as well.

The other fun part of this brew session was the lack of a scale for weighing hops and malts.   All measurements are approximate.

10lb munich

15lb Two Row

1oz – Columbus, 1oz Cluster – Bittering

2.5 oz  Cluster at flame out.

I mashed at 148, for an hour, and added about a gallon or two of near boiling water to bump up the mash temp.  Recirculate, and sparge.

I collected 11 gallons and my run off was still measuring 1.032 – meaning I still had some sugars that I was rinsing out.

My final gravity was 10 pt higher than I expected, so I either used a bit more malt or was able to extract more sugars than I normally do.  I suspect a bit of both.

I will dry hop in the next few days (7-9days of fermentation), 5 gallons will be bottled, and the rest kegged.

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 8:27 am.
Filed under brewing.
Subscribe to RSS 2.0.
Leave a comment or trackback.