First brew day was a success!
Details:
So, here's the setup: HLT made from a New Belgium keg converted with spigot and turndown. Boil kettle made from an AB keg converted with false bottom and turndown, spigot, thermometer, and sight glass. Two LP gas turkey fryer burners mounted to frame. MLT made from a 10 gallon GOTT cooler with spigot and stainless braided hose screen. March pump with quick disconnects. Plate chiller mounted to frame.
We checked for leaks and cleaned/sanitized all equipment Monday, the day before brew day. Also started our yeast starter. Didn't get much surface activity in the beaker, but I read that that doesn't mean anything.
So, we had a total of 10lbs, 2oz of grain and 1lb of rice hulls in our batch. We mashed in with 3.5g at around 162-163ish which then cooled to about 151 or so. Stirred it up really good and put the lid on for our 90 minute mash. I checked our temp about 30 minutes in and it didn't drop much, so I decided to leave it alone for the rest of the mash. After the mash, I checked it again and it was around 148, probably from me taking the lid off the first time. (won't do that again) So, we vorlaufed and it came out pretty clean to begin with, so we poured it back over the mash onto some aluminum foil and proceeded to drain the MLT the rest of the way slowly. Heated up our sparge water and got it down to what Beersmith said it should be temp wise, 168. First sparge was around 4 gallons at 168. Vorlaufed and then drained that. Second sparge was another gallon because I didn't feel like we had enough wort in the boil kettle. I was shooting for around 7 gallons, so I drained till I had that much.
Started the boil and once we got it up to around 210 we put in the bittering hops, .5 oz Hallertau. I then turned down our gas to where we were still getting a rolling boil, but didn't waste so much gas. Then 45 minutes into the boil we put in our aroma hops, .25 oz Saaz, and .25 oz Perle.
After the 60 minute boil was done, we sanitized our fermenter and all hoses/spigots and we hooked up our garden hose to the plate chiller and then recirculated the wort through to chill. This brought the temp down super quick to around 75 degrees. Maybe had to cool 3-4 minutes total. Then we pumped into our primary fermenter bucket (temporary). Got around 5.5 gallons out of the boil kettle and carried it down to the basement in the bucket. Checked OG with my refractometer after stirring several times and came out to 1.080 which was super high! :-\
We looked it up and read that we could add filtered water to dilute the wort before pitching the yeast, so I added 1.125 gallons and got it down to 1.063, which was still high, but at this point, my bucket was almost all the way full and I had to leave enough room for the yeast starter too. I figured I would have a lot of blow off since the level was so high, so I did a blowoff tube in a growler half full of starsan inside of a 5 gallon bucket.
About 24 hours into the ferment, we had a full growler and about 2" of crap in the bottom of the bucket around the growler. But now we're on our 3rd day and everything has calmed down. Now we wait till this Tuesday before we transfer to our secondary (5g glass carboy). I'm going to try some at that time, so I hope it turned out good.
I found out that it is physically impossible to get 1.080 out of the grain we had, so I don't know if I read it wrong or what, but I took 5 different readings after stirring and got the same 1.080 everytime. I think one big mistake I made was sparging too low a temp. I didn't know that you had to get the grain bed up to 168, not the water. So I should've probably poured about 185-190 degree water in during the sparge. I will change this for next batch.
Also, we plan on getting a Fast Fermenter this Saturday and a nice Keezer as well.
If anybody has any suggestions or anything, let me know. Overall, I would say we did pretty decent.
Nick
