It's been well over a year since I brewed last. Since then, we moved out of SF to a city in the suburbs, but my old in-kitchen 2.5 gallon setup just didn't work in the new place. Over the past few months I've been building up equipment to do an outdoor, three-tier, propane fired brewsystem. And finally, yesterday I had my first brew day!
The system is built out of a couple of turkey fryers, and a 10-gallon cooler, on wire shelving.
I brewed the taddy porter clone from "Brewing Classic Styles." I made a 1L starter the night before.
Things went pretty well, with only a few issues:
1) Turns out, if you try to add water to a pot with its lid on, you get drenched. (who knew?)
2) My digital thermometer ran out of batteries right before I was going to spot-check the mash temperature. An analog, uncalibrated thermometer I had nearby read 150 degrees, but I don't know what the temperature actually ended up as.
3) While vorlaufing, I never actually saw the wort "run clear"... there was always some grainy stuff in there. After about 6 pitchers, I just started sparging.
4) My refractometer was harder to use than I thought. From reading descriptions, I expected a sharp line in the viewpoint, showing the density. Instead, the difference between the blue area and grey area was a fuzzy line, so it was hard to see the SG with better than .003 precision. (The numbers on the scale were in focus, just not the measurement itself)
Even though there wasn't much headroom in my boil kettle, I only got one boilover, in the last 5 minutes (when I least expected it of course....) My final hydrometer measurement showed 1.051, so only a few points off from where I was aiming.
This morning, it already had a good inch of krausen on top, and sitting at a perfect 67 degrees in my temp-controlled chest freezer!
Overall, I think I pretty good brewday considering how long it's been, and a considering it was a new system!
I'm excited to be back!
The system is built out of a couple of turkey fryers, and a 10-gallon cooler, on wire shelving.
I brewed the taddy porter clone from "Brewing Classic Styles." I made a 1L starter the night before.
Things went pretty well, with only a few issues:
1) Turns out, if you try to add water to a pot with its lid on, you get drenched. (who knew?)
2) My digital thermometer ran out of batteries right before I was going to spot-check the mash temperature. An analog, uncalibrated thermometer I had nearby read 150 degrees, but I don't know what the temperature actually ended up as.
3) While vorlaufing, I never actually saw the wort "run clear"... there was always some grainy stuff in there. After about 6 pitchers, I just started sparging.
4) My refractometer was harder to use than I thought. From reading descriptions, I expected a sharp line in the viewpoint, showing the density. Instead, the difference between the blue area and grey area was a fuzzy line, so it was hard to see the SG with better than .003 precision. (The numbers on the scale were in focus, just not the measurement itself)
Even though there wasn't much headroom in my boil kettle, I only got one boilover, in the last 5 minutes (when I least expected it of course....) My final hydrometer measurement showed 1.051, so only a few points off from where I was aiming.
This morning, it already had a good inch of krausen on top, and sitting at a perfect 67 degrees in my temp-controlled chest freezer!
Overall, I think I pretty good brewday considering how long it's been, and a considering it was a new system!
I'm excited to be back!
