We've got buckets and pans and empty water bottles and stirrers and scrubbers and cleaners and thermometers and old mess kits.
We've searched websites and watched more youtube how to videos than we can count. I learned how to open up a sankey keg for cleaning and filling. Despite the warning that this is not the type of keg you want for homebrewing because of the difficulty in dealing with the tap connection hardware, I gave it a shot. It was simple, took about three minutes on my first try.
Thursday, Dave and I kept the local Beermakers Supply shop owner from closing her store on time in order to crack grain and pick out hops. She was very helpful and even made copies of recipes from some books she had on the for sale shelf. Another less helpful individual may have made us truck back home to retrieve the recipes we forgot or made us buy a book. She did neither.
We had to adjust our recipes to account for the inability to secure the recommended ingredients. She also helped us out with this by recommending hops and yeast that will match our grains and selected beer styles. This shop is also the only place we know of with an electric grain cracker and it worked like a charm. We even got to go in the backroom to help the owner pull out a new bag of Pilsen Malt.
Friday after work I loaded up a wagon full of implements and dry goods and delivered the cache to Dave's.
Saturday morning, not too long past day break, we gathered in Dave's workshop and reviewed recipes and procedures and began brewing beer. Despite all the research the fact that we are novices was clearly apparent. As I said in a previous post, we are trying to brew three beers initially. Well time constraints prevented us from attempting three today, probably a good thing, but two batches are now sitting in fermenting buckets. So, the day was a success.
Using the word success may be premature as we did not properly account for how long it takes to bring liquid to a boil. It also takes a lot longer when you don't properly set up your burner and it continues to blow itself out. A call to Robert to discuss the mechanics finally got us going. We also thought we could get Mike's extract nut brown boiled and bucketed before Dave's oberon mash was ready for sparging. Yes, sparging. I'll say it again, sparging. We like the word and I will try to use it as often as possible - sparging.
Sparging - Extracing liquid from the mash tun and then rinsing the grain with the liquid to get all the good juices from your mash into a boiling pot. This liquid is called the wort. The mash tun is where we put the dry grain and then added hot water to let the grain soak at a specific temperature.
Dave's mash was supposed to soak for 90 minutes but boiling problems with Mike's wort lengthened that a bit. We only had one burner so we had to finish Mike's boil before we could get Dave's started. Cooling down Mike's wort also took longer than we anticipated although Dave's cooling rig worked pretty well.
When we finally got Dave's wort into the boiling pot we were so excited that we turned our backs on the pot and retreated to Dave's workshop. It was 44 degrees and raining and we were trying to do as much outside as possible for obvious smell, fire and spillage reasons. We were outside getting wet for a while cooling Mike's wort and transferring to the fermenting bucket. We retreated to shelter.
On checking the boil we saw that the hop sock in Dave's wort opened up. I tied it, my fault. We again retreated to shelter. We noticed Mike's fermenting bucket was leaking at the spout and began a transfer so that we could tighten the connection. No great problem but while distracted by this the water temp on Dave's wort rose and so did the boil. Wort and hops foamed and ran all down the sides of the pot. We got that under control but it was a mess. Dave commented that its a good thing we didn't attempt this in the kitchen.
It took an extremely long time to return the wort to a boil. We must of knocked the plate on the burner out of position during the boil over. Mike had to cut out to handle parenting duties so Dave and I were left to finish up the wort cool down and transfer to the fermenting bucket. We had to strain out the hops while pouring but there were no more mishaps to report. Except that Dave forgot to take a hydrometer reading before sealing the bucket so it will be a guess on when fermentation time is complete.
Also neither of the fermentation buckets have spouts, we decided not to transfer Mike's back to the original bucket, so taking further readings means taking the top off . I don't think this is recommended but we'll do whatever needs to be done. I say leave it for the recommended fermentation time and see what happens.
There are many details that I'm leaving out but I hope you get the gist, both good (mash tun, cooling coil, screening) and bad (overboil, hop sack break, bad timing of batch overlaps) happened. We plan on brewing the last batch on Monday evening. We'll see if we learned anything from our previous two.
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