A little before Christmas, I started to reminisce about some of my dad's beer brewing experiments. On several occasions I helped him brew a batch. We had some good results and some not so good results. He always used extract kits, but my elevated level of nerd ego had me thinking, 'Hey, why not do it the right way!' So, I went online and ordered myself a kit and some nice all-grain wheat beer ingredients (Note: Ordering oneself a present mere weeks before Christmas tends to make the wife irritable). The kit arrived and was definitely set up for extract breweing, but I made a few modifications that I thought would get me through the first batch. In January, I finally took time to brew on a Saturday. I spent a lot of time going over the procedure while cleaning and sanitizing everything. Anything not to be immediately used was covered with plastic wrap. Everything went smoothly until time to start the sparge process. As I started to drain the wort into the boil kettle, I got a stuck sparge almost immediately. My modification didn't work! No worries. With a little ingenuity and a metal strainer, we managed to do a batch sparge by pouring the mash tun through the strainer and into the boil pot. A second batch of hot water was added to the mash and about 15 minutes later we poured that too. Not the most elegant or efficient, but it worked. I had a decent enough starting gravity. I boiled for an hour adding in some Cascade hops for 45 minutes and again at the end for only 15 minutes. I had devised my own wort chiller and after boil, we dropped from boiling to pitching temp in about 20 minutes. Not too shabby! With the wort pitched and safely in the fermentor, I set to cleaning up the place. All in all it took about 7 hours start to finish. The next morning I woke to the pleasant sounds of gases escaping the air lock. Here's to beer! -chuck |
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