Saturday, February 28, 2009

Brew #2: Amber Style Ale and an overview of my humble system

So today we bottled up the stout I brewed a week ago. I remade the recipe to the best of my memory that won me a medal a few years ago. Tasted a little sample (pre carbonation/aging) and tasted delicious. Can't wait the few weeks until it's ready to pour!

So here's today's brew complete with pictures to give an idea of how I'm operating here. My system is far from elaborate, but in an apartment, I'm limited to what I can do.

Amber Style Ale
Starting Gravity- 1.0600

Recipe:
Grain Bill:
32.00 oz Pale Malt (2 Row) US (3.0 SRM)
5.00 oz Munich Malt (9.0 SRM)
3.00 oz Caramel/Crystal Malt - 20L (20.0 SRM)
1.00 oz Caramel/Crystal Malt -120L (120.0 SRM)
.50 oz Black Barley (Stout) (500.0 SRM)

Hops:
0.25 oz Northern Brewer [8.50 %] (30 min)
0.13 oz Northern Brewer [8.50 %] (0 min)


The very humble setup:
Photobucket

The inside of my home made mash tun. The sealant I used around the fitting there looks a bit ripe after I brewed the stout


Mashing the grains. Added 170f degree water, this gets the temperature of the pile of grains there to about 155f.


So last week on my first try brewing with this setup, I found that this small of a batch of grains is hard to keep at 155f for a full hour. I solved this problem by turning my oven to 170f, and keeping the mash tun in there. I check the temp of the grains every 15mins.


The mash is done, and it's time to mash out. I drip the wort in to the pot and keep doing additions of 170f water to the mash tun. I use a collander to break up the flow of water to not disturb the grain bed.




And there she boils! 1hr boil total.


After the boil I put the pot into a sink of ice water. What's nice about a 1gal batch is this actually works very quickly, and there's no need for expensive copper chillers. I then funneled the wort (the unfermented beer) into the fermenter. I use a 1gal growler as a fermenter.


Ah yes, yeast... Can't forget the yeast. Here's a mason jar with some Wyeast Irish Ale Yeast pulled from a fermenter at Big Al Brewing. It's nice to not have to spend $8 on yeast for every batch :) So now it's time for this here to make its way into the beer and start the feeding frenzy. Alcohol is just yeast poop afterall.


And alas, the fermenter, the wort, and the yeast become one.... This is where beer starts happening. Time to throw it in a cool, dark place for a few days.

An intro

So I've had this blog for a while, but blogged mainly about things I don't like. I decided that I want to be more fun and keep a log of my homebrewing, and my quest to open my own microbrewery. I've been brewing for 4yrs now, both professionally and recreationally. I no longer work in a brewery, but now have a strong goal of owning a small production microbrewery.

I moved to Washington in 2007 to work on my brewing career, and I only ended up working for about 4 months doing it. I just couldn't afford to live on an entry level position wage. Previous to that, I worked part time for Orlando Brewing in Florida, and got a lot of awesome hands on experience with everything. Just yesterday actually I started volunteering to help out part time at Big AL Brewing in Seattle, an awesome startup microbrewery just to learn a new system, and get back in to running some big equipment.

I did my first homebrew batch in the fall of 2005, and brewed about once a week until I moved to Washington in 2007. I've entered one of my beers in a competition one time, and won a first place medal (I've had multiples of my recipes win medals, but they were brewed by someone else)... Which gave me a lot of confidence to keep at it and set some lofty goals for what to do with this. This has been the first thing I've ever been truly good at.

So my homebrewing has kind of been put on the backburner since moving here. Main reasons being that I couldn't afford to put together the elaborate homebrewing system I wanted to do, and because I don't have the space. In the apartment Amber and I now live in, I finally have space to store a few things, but not the space to do traditional 5gal homebrew batches. I solved my dilemma by piecing together a pretty crafty little 1gal system. It works perfect for doing stovetop brews, and it's nice to have the ability to experiment with new stuff and not risk wasting the costly 5gal batch.

Anyways, I'll be updating this with pictures and fun stuff as I do my brews, which will be every 1 to 2wks.