Oh Raspberries …blphhhttt… : (

It’s been a good month since we started sampling our first batches. We’re all down to critical replacement levels. All three beers turned out to be entirely drinkable. This was a welcome surprise seeing as we used the fly by the seat of your pants production manual on that first weekend.

When I arrived, Dave was putting the finishing touches on the new mash tun. Our first tun worked but was small and the drain hose wouldn’t stay put. Dave and I cleaned up the modified cooler and heated water for the mash. We got a new burner and pot so we don’t have to borrow the turkey fryer.

We set out this morning to be a little more methodical in our approach but homebrewing we have found is more like a night at the Improv than some well choreographed play.

Our first small snag was the outside temperature. It was about eighteen degrees Fahrenheit when we began. The hose bib was frozen so we filled about five 5-gallon buckets with water from the kitchen sink to get us started. You just can’t hose things down in subfreezing temperatures and this makes a water reliant process a little more difficult.

We compared recipes to see which one we should approach first. Dave chose a Raspberry Wheat. His first brew was a wheat so adding the raspberry puree should be simple. I chose a Strong English style Ale and Mike is going for a bourbon infused Imperial Stout, very ambitious. We decided early that we’d only attempt one brew today. It’s much easier to concentrate on mash temperatures, sparging, wort boil and hop additions when you’re not jumping between batches. I deferred to Dave since, one, its his house and two, his batch calls for a half hour less boil time.

The new burner brought the water to temperature quickly. We deposited the grain in the tun and added the heated water.

Mike showed up and brought in his supplies. We had an hour for steeping so following the cleaning of carboy fermenters and preparing the kettle and hops for the wort boil we did what brewers do with a little down time. We sampled some of our previous product and shot the bull about what great brewers we are and how we can be better.

After an hour, we began the sparge. The new tun drain worked great. It’s larger so the grain is more spread out. The drain filter worked well with little particle deposit into the wort.

We re-lit the burner and brought the wort to a boil being very careful to keep a watchful eye on the pot. We achieved boil quickly, reduced the heat and Dave added the first helping of hops. We did some further cleaning and kibitzing.

Mike had to split early so Dave and I were left to finish the boil, cool the wort and make the transfer to the fermenter. First we had to puree the raspberries and add them to the carboy. Dave fabricated a funnel from a plastic water jug and I spooned the puree into the funnel while he mashed it into the glass receptacle. This was a highly laborious process. The raspberries were previously frozen and we had left them outside after we ran them through the blender. Dave nearly got frostbite holding the funnel in place. His numb fingers would come back to haunt him.

We added the finishing hops and a small bit of Irish Moss, a clarifying agent. Ten minutes later we killed the flame and began the cool down. Our improved cooling coil was nothing but a decoration today due to the lack of hose water. We had to go old style and let the outside temperature work its magic while we assisted with a few transfers between a sanitized bucket and the brew kettle. We used a siphon hose to transfer the wort into the glass carboy.

Dave thought we filled the fementer a little too much. He was concerned about overflow during fermentation. We decided to use the hose and jug method to let the CO2 out of the huge jar rather than fuss with the small plastic gas release valve. Wee took a minute to set the system up. This method is more efficient and you have less chance of blow out due to better gas release. Dave was going along with this and then suddenly decided again that there was too much in the bottle. There was about three quarters of a gallon of wort left in the bucket. He would just pour some off and do an additional ferment in the bucket.

Dave lifted the glass carboy to pour.

Do you have any idea how much a glass carboy with five gallons of beer along with four pounds of soaked raspberry puree weighs?

Do you know how hard it is to pour a five gallon jug of liquid with the outside slippery from beer?

Do you know how hard it is to pour a full five gallon slippery glass jug of beer with your fingers still numb from funneling raspberries?

Well ……. we found out.

CRASH!!!!

Not a cuss word was spoken. We were in shock. I’m still in shock. It happened so fast … crash … glass and beer everywhere. A whole morning’s work went down the drain, a full batch of beer down the drain. Heck, we’re lucky there was a drain.

It was quiet, real quiet, a beer drinkers nightmare but we weren’t sleeping.

We reacted fairly quickly in our stunned haze and cleaned up as much of the glass and beer we could without the benefit of a working hose. Dave was completely dejected.

I could find no words to console him. He shook my hand, nearly pushed me out the door and said he was heading for the showers.

The Bier Werkes took a major hit today. This close to having another batch bubbling away in the basement and it explodes right in our faces. There’s not a thing either one of us could have done to prevent it. It just happened. There was no way to improvise a fix for this one. As they say … at least no one got hurt. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

Yet, we live on to brew another day.

Long live the Bier Werkes!