It's time. So, picking up where the Beer thread left off...




1) Wet Grain = Heavy. Hell yes. I'm only doing 5 lb balls of mixed malts when I mash, so I use a long-handled sturdy strainer thing that sits atop my 7 gallon steel pot. But because it only anchors in 2 places (the handle and a little prong off the far end), it can tip sideways and dump your shit right back in there... ask me how I know. Seems like in your case you could sorta star-pattern some rods like that across the top of the pot at all angles and it would support the weight, allow dripping, and not tip and fuck shit up. ? I can only imagine how heavy 11 lbs of dry grain would be soaked.

2) Mashout. So I'm doing something different, and somehow I am also getting around 70% attenuation pretty much regularly so I just KEEP doing it. (shrug) I mash 5 lb's in about 1.75 gallons at the usual temps (150-160F, lower for sweeter beer, higher for dryer and more alcohol) for around 45 minutes. Then I take a pot and a tea kettle, and I heat up strike water in them to 170F, and sparge by slowly sprinkling that water through the grain ball on its strainer. Once that's drained, I squeeze a little, then carry the spent mash out to the compost. That leaves me with a little over 2 gallons, which I then boil still on the stovetop - actually on one burner, even. It will keep a roiling boil at 75% blast. But I stir in the DME (6 lb's last night for example) to the wort right before it hits boiling. Then when it hits boil I toss in bittering hops and boil it for about an hour, depending on the hop schedule. That gets me down to 2 gallons or even a tiny bit less, so when I put the 7 gallon pot in the sink with ice water, I can fill to 5 gallons right there in the steel pot with ice and water and get it immediately down to about 92F. Some stirring and a good aerating pour into the carboy and it's below 90F, and fuck it I pitch at 90. The SECOND I have a yeast problem I'll follow the whispered mantra of not pitching til 70F or whatever. Meanwhile yeast is not a problem I'm having, those Nottingham fuckers last night were bubbling in 60 minutes, no joke. More on that later.

3) Plastic... waaah ha. I use a big cheap 2-foot-long steel bbq fork to stir.

4) What to start the yeast on... I used to use extract, but lately the last 2 I just put warm water in a coffee mug, sqizzled in a shot each of agave nectar and honey, then swizzled in the yeast with my finger and covered it on the counter with a cloth napkin. 30 minutes later it's pushing the napkin off the top of the mug, angry and rarin' to go. Those things were ready to BRAWL. Like I said, as soon as I start having a yeast problem I'll revisit my routine, but right now I have no complaints.


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So last night I was making chilli in the slow cooker, and it occurred to me I could also be making beer. Both are a "add something, stir, wait and watch the temp for 30 minutes" sorta deal. So I made a porter.

Malt bill:

6 lb's Pilsner DME
.75lb Choclate Malt
.75lb Crystal 120
.25 Black Patent
.25 lb Victory
.5 Smoked Malt (Beechwood)

Nottingham yeast (dry)
1.75 oz UK Fuggles, boiled 1 hour

I steeped hot (160F) on the stove in the big pot for 30 mins in a little under 2 gallons, then sparged with 170F water, about 2 quarts, since it was a small grain ball. That smoked malt, man, that shit smells incredible. That and the chocolate and black patent sets off my Winter Beer boner. Very exciting new twist to the usual suspects, that smoked malt. So then I hit full blast, got it up to about 200, stirred in 6 lb's of DME, brought it to a boil, tossed in 1.75 oz of fuggles (and about 8 nuggets of the Centennial I've had in the freezer for 8 months and am trying to get rid of), and boiled an hour. See above, cooled it down etc, pitched, put it away in the coat closet.

1 hour later it's bubbling softly, about 1 blurp every 4 seconds. Off to bed I go.

This morning I get dressed, get ready to take the dog out and get to work before the 7:45 conference call. Open coat closet, and discover the aftermath of a malty chainsaw masacre. The porter has clogged and blown its airlock sky high. There is chocolately brown crust on... everything. This being the only coat closet (and the place I store my cameras and film), "everything" is unfortunately a meaningful term. Wife up? No still sleeping but it won't last. Kid? Ditto. How long til the call? 20 minutes. You won't make it. Take your work shirt off, grab rags, get started. I scrubbed sheetrock, pulled out cases of empties and conditioning beer, took down 4 coats that were "too far gone" and needed a full wash, carefully rag-wiped the others, put the porter in the bathtub with a blow-off hose into a pint glass and sprayed the carboy down, made the conference call, hung up 15 mins later and finished then went to work. Wife got up, didn't seem overly concerned. Still finding little bits of mash and hops on my jacket and shoes. Oh yeah, the inside of the closet door is a massive shoe rack with all our shoes on it. Good shit.

Jesus. I would be so dead if I did this.

When wifewilleatyou came home on Friday I was cleaning up some spillover and she just about tossed me out. To her credit, she's nine months preggers, I think she handled it pretty well.

Over the next 4 or 5 weeks as she pulls out those coats and puts them all on one by one, she will discover more and more tiny porter-colored splotches in places I missed. It is inevitable. God help me if a good one catches us on the wrong day.

2) I was told by my shop not to expect much more than 50% for brew in a bag, they said that's what they've been hitting in the store's set up. So, hitting 60% I was extremely pleased. I can still add a 10 min mashout ... especially with my outdoor burner... and I can also build something so I can lift my bag out and let that drip for a while. That's probably some of the best/most saturated wort...and I lost a bit of it this round. Also, I could really get into the water chemistry stuff. I did use a tablespoon of mash stabilizer 5.2 but I really doubt this generic trick is ideal...I imagine if I really dive into it, there's a few points to gain. Next round I will have some sort of strainer basket. Either way, I think I'm done using my cooler mashtun for most scenarios. Even if my efficiency doesn't improve I would rather spend a dollar or two more on grain and have one less thing to clean/bring up from the basement.

3) I'm going to make myself a beautiful wooden paddle as soon as possible. About 1/3 of the equipment I have is burrowed from someone who gave up the hobby. Sadly, I owe him this plastic paddle now.

4) That's a rad yeast method I haven't heard of. I would love something I can do when I start my brewday vs. a day ahead of time. Most of the time I try to keep a lower OG just because I don't want to make a starter. How far have you pushed this method?

I've done double batches of yeast. Literally just a bigger glass, and slightly more honey / agave. I've been told that feeding them sucrose that's chemically different from what's in the wort is going to "confuse" them, etc, but frankly I'm getting a little wary of people who personify yeast. I'm sure these guys make amazing homebrew but fucksake I have a toddler and I'm in the kitchen and it's all going down my own gullet anyway, and it NEVER causes me problems. I start the coffee mug when I first bring everything down and set up, just in case it takes longer to get revved up. But it never does. Shit is always UP and ready. SafAle California dry yeast and Danstar Nottingham are the two specific ones I've just done in the past 2 days, but previously it includes wet stuff from White Labs too. -shrug- Show me a problem like slow starts, stuck batches, incomplete fermentation, etc, and I'll be the first one to question the starter method. 99 problems but a stuck batch ain't one.

As for 50-60% attenuation... the more I read, the more I think for now (this house, a kid this age, etc) I am in the Sweet Spot for effort-vs-reward. 3-6 lb's of DME and up to 5 lb's of stovetop mashing and I get good beer, all done in 3 hours, inside the house. All stored in the space of the 7 gallon kettle and 3 fermentors.

I keep planning on getting lower %, like on this porter. I was expecting a 6% beer, and yet at 5 gallons and temp corrected, OG was 1.077, or 9.8% potential alcohol. Should finish around 9%, which is NUTS. It was 6 lb's of DME and 2.5 lb's of grain, some of which was crystal so it shouldn't even really contribute. It's gonna be an ass-kicker, and I was aiming for "fireplace session beer."

Jesus man. Hell of a way to start the day. I would've grabbed a trash bag, thrown any item of clothing it touched and just taken it all to the dry cleaners just to be sure.

Just to clarify, the % I was talking about is my mash effiency (amount of sugar I can get from the grain) and not my attenuation. I assume my attenuation is pretty typical what is expected.

I would have left a note with flowers and the hotel I was staying at.

And its LadyTimes, too, so I was expecting a lamp thrown at me. I guess the day ain't over yet...

Ok yeah I need to go figure out what my efficiency was - good point I confused those two.

Also, I don't know how ya'll aerate your wort once it's in the fermentor...but I read about lots of people shaking carboys and how it gets real dangerous with the glass ones. I just made a small teeter totter for my carboy out of an old paint roller, scrap wood and duct tape. It's been the handiest device. I can't seem to find anything like my invention out there in the homebrew world yet...which really surpised me. I might make a nice one if I find the time. I can shake the piss out of my wort with this. I highly recommend this.

I just pour aggressively through the funnel when I first pitch everything into the fermentor, but after that I usually leave it be. Should I be English Nannying it? I do want it to all settle out and clear up at some point...

Nah, you're fine. If the whole volume has been boiling for a long time, a lot of oxygen is removed. So, in those cases, you should definitely vigorously knock it around before you pitch yeasties. A lot of people use oxegen pumps and fancy set ups...but I won't do that until I run into problems without doing that.

With your setup, half of your volume was water that just got added, it would still have a lot of oxygen in it.
I would bet money that you're just fine.

I still shake my extract batches a bit...but I move to the fermentor once I'm below 100...and the shaking helps with the final bit of cooling.

I want to try your significant mash plus extract method soon also.

Nother dirty confession: If I'm in a hurry, I make Hop Tea on the side during the mash, then I boil the full volume for MAYBE 5 minutes to sanitize / short-boil some hops, and then I cool immediately. I more or less cut out the full boil sometimes. Some styles call for a long boil (scotch ale) but for a simple pale, sometimes I just minimize it to almost nothing. You don't get the FULL deal with small hop tea volume, I hear, but... it works well enough in a hurry.

One more thing... let's talk about bottling.

I don't own my place, and even though it's big it's tiny. I can't install a tap system, or a kegerator, there is not room for it. So I've been using a mix of swingtop bottles (mostly grolsch 15 oz'ers) and growlers. I want to move to those stainless steel double wall growlers, where a 5 gallon batch would be like 6 growlers and 15 grolsch bottles. The swingtops and grolwers are so fucking EASY, I just don't have a lot of motivation to pay all that damned money for kegging (like buying fucking CO2 just does not sound fun), much less find a place to put it. As-is, it's not like people walk into the house and see "gear." I like that, though if I owned a house I might recant.

I really respect that. I like that you keep minimal. 5 minute boil..holy shit that's awesome.

I'm just proud that I can do extract batches and clean up in 3 hours. AG with this brew in a bag method in under 4.

Shit like this looks like fun to play with

But I see it as an extra hour of cleaning/extra cleaning expense/extra storage space and at the cost of about 40 batches of beer.
No thanks, you dudes can keep that next to your 4 wheelers.

I also don't keg. I have no space for an extra fridge. If I ever owned my own home I would probably invest in a lagering fridge before a kegerator. Maybe not though because right now I'm "lagering" at basement temps with the bohemian lager yeast and it appears to be working fine. Everyone says I'd love kegging and never look back but bottling just doesn't bother me. Can't imagine having people over and running out of CO2...which would definitely happen to me.

This.

My wife's uncle outside Madison (who I just call my uncle because he's fucking awesome) has had a tapper setup for about 8 years now I guess, so I've seen one in action a lot. He used to keg his own beers, and then he just got lazy after years of brewing and started buying kegs of beer. So now he's always got 2 kinds of beer on tap, but he didn't brew them. It's really nice, but it's expensive and you have regulators and CO2 and all that shit. What I WOULD really enjoy about it is not waiting for bottle conditioning... Oh it's done in the fermentor? Toss it in the keg, carbonate, and like the next day or two you're comsuming. But right now I don't jones for one.

As for the Megatron / Tower Of power up there, it's cool but I feel like when you start buying shit like that, you'd better be Selling your beer. Right now I am very happy learning what different malts and hops and yeasts taste like, poking into all the corners with each new batch and having an experience of each kind. I've dicovered that i REALLY like victory malt, btw. Victory and Maris Otter.

Not sure yet, but I think I am able to pinpoint Maris Otter in a couple beers I had recently. Specifically that three tree rye beer and the odells isolation ale. I could be wrong though...I will know for sure when I start using it myself. I've discovered that I can no longer drink beer fast... I just want to savor, understand it and pick it apart now.

I use a 5 gallon fermentation bucket from Northern Brewer for my primary fermentation and place both the brewing kettle and it in an ice bath in the massive laundry bucket I use for my swamp cooler until the temperature drops down to at least 68 degrees. I gently rock it back and forth or simply give it a few slow shakes to churn the wart inside as I stare at the thermometer reading. I know some people religiously aerate their wort with a drill stirrer, but it really seems like a big waste of time and money.

I have a homebrew club friend that owns a screen printing business that has a four grand home brew set up in his basement that includes numerous electronic dials for fine tuning his brewing process. It is pretty ridiculous, but when you are a young hipster making pretty good dough in a state like Nebraska, I guess there are worse things you could be wasting your money on.
The moduluar beer stands are a pretty good investment for anyone with an actual home brewery, and really make public brewing demonstrations incredibly easy to do. I haven't made the jump to all-grain, but if I ever do it will be because I have a garage to place a modualr beer stand inside for home brewing.

I really want to find a way to go all-grain without having huge equipment. There's a farm in western mass doing fucking organic barley, wheat, and rye, AND malting it themselves. And they deliver here in Cambridge, so it would be really nice to use their shit exclusively. Like, I just need a giant orange adapted Gott cooler, right? And then I would heat mash water to 170 or so, dump it in so it drops to 155ish, then drain off, sparge with 170F to stop enzymes, boil, cool (and there I'm fucked, I don't have or really want a cooler that wastes water), and I'd be ok... could I hide a huge orange cooler somewhere in my house?

All you need is a bag.
I think this is the one I bought. -> http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/larg ... -x-19.html
This is the video that made me think of trying it. -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6WVul6IEKk
He only makes a 3 gallon. But I had no problem getting 4 and pretty sure I could get 5 with my 7.5 kettle.

Otherwise, I use a rectangular 48 qt cooler...using a toilet hose to catch the grains as they leave. Many people like this method. I heat mash water to closer 175..because it seems to lose close to 10 degrees on transfer and typically lose 10-11 more when I add the grains. If it doesn't lose as much heat as I thought it would I could just add some ice... waaay easier to make it colder than warmer.

But after just one attempt with the bag I think the cooler is going to be for rare occasion.

Maybe that will change after I actually taste it. But I loved the bag method. So easy. I was typically already using a small bag for steeping anyways so this is actually less steps since I'm not adding extract.

I use what may be the identical bag for my 5 lb grain mashes now, and then I also re-use it for hop additions during the boil to keep the wort clearer. Watching vid now.