I'm back in the real world, for now. I sure do like my brew set up here, things are in the right place, the water is good, equipment is great, so it was a pretty nice brew day. My only concern is the yeast, I didn't make the hour long trip to the "local" homebrew store to by new, so I made a starter from yeast from last fall. I built it up over 3 days and I tasted it before I pitched it, no off flavors that I could tell.
10 gallon batch
This is made out of what I had on hand, which was a lot of base malt and not so much specialty, like I'm completely out of crystal of any shade. Again, I didn't want to make that long drive to the homebrew store.
5 lb, 5 oz 2-row, all that I had
1 lb white wheat
14 lb, 12 oz pilsner, I have lots of this
7 oz biscuit, all that I had, and why not?
2 oz chocolate malt, all that I had, and a little color is good
Mashed at some temperature around 150 - 155F, I forgot to check when I mashed in, but I did see it was about 152F when I started recirculation. pH adjusted to 5.38.
Hops are all Cascade for this recipe because I have a lot on hand, like 2 pounds from last years crop. 90 minute boil.
1 oz FWH
3 oz 60 minutes
1 oz 20 minutes
2 tsp Irish moss 15 minutes
2 oz at flameout
I was cleaning things since I hadn't been in the beer shed in months, and thought I had some time, but I still got a boil-over. Crap. A little messy, but whatever. The rest of the boil went well. I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, but I started chilling then we had guests arrive in the middle. After about an hour of visiting, I excused myself and the wort was right at pitching temperature. I'm wondering how hoppy this will be since the hops had been in for almost 3 hours.
Another thing to mention, for my future reference (Hi Dale!), is that the chest freezer that I use to fermenting has died, so I needed to clean out my fridge in the beer shed. I use that for conditioning, mostly, it holds 6 kegs and I do have 2 taps on it. It's the only other cooling device that I have that I can ferment in. So that was part of the "cleaning things" that I mentioned, there were several kegs in there from last year that were of questionable flavor -- the basil IPA was still good, although the hops had dropped off considerably, the Panama Red was totally sour, the Leeser had a surprisingly good green apple flavor, the Red Seal was toast, the Dunkel was good, but gone in 2 days.
Details from Brewtarget, which has been almost useless with the last update. Really dumb things, like there is a choice on where to add the hops, you can add them to the mash, the boil, the fermenter, or the package. Default should be to the boil, but no, it's to the mash. Weird, mash hops are almost never heard of now.
OG: 1.050 (didn't do an actual, there were those guests that I metioned)
FG: 1.013
ABV: 4.8
IBU: 44.3
SRM: 6.2 (probably would be out of spec if I hadn't added the chocolate)
