Brewday
Today I’m brewing Mo Betta Lite. I got off to a little later start than I wanted today, but that’s pretty typical for my brewdays.
The recipe I’m using today is here: Mo Betta Lite – 2009-01-19
11:40 – Mashed in at 148F, pH 5.4
13:10 – Added “mashout” water and began 1st runoff, also started heating batch sparge water… ahh the joys of only having one burner…
14:10 – My first boilover in a really long time! What a mess. That’s what I get for working on a website while bringing wort to a boil. Looks like I overshot my gravity by quite a bit, I was reading 9.8 Brix after the boilover and I’m shooting for an OG at 9.3 Brix. I added about a gallon of Brita water to bring it down in the 9.0 Brix range. I’ll still overshoot my gravity, but not by quite as much.
14:50 – Just saw that my Belgian Oatmeal Stout didn’t place at the January AHA COC. It’s a really tasty beer, so I’m a little disappointed. I’m curious what the scoresheets are going to say. Hopefully it does better at the Batch 50 competition at The Bruery next weekend.
15:45 – Turned on the chiller and took a quick reading with the refractometer. It says we’re at about 10.8 Brix, or 1.042. I’m a little lower on volume than I like, so I’ll probably pick up some water from the store and dilute it back down. I’m hunting for an online dilution calculator since BeerAlchemy doesn’t seem to include one. (Update: Found one by Drew Beechum from the Maltose Falcons on this page http://www.maltosefalcons.com/tech/. It’s an Excel file, so I had to load it into Google Docs to see it, but that seems to be working well enough. 1 G of water should get me to around 1.038 which would be good.)
16:45 – Turned off the chiller, got the wort down to about 65F after I ran to the store to pick up some ice so I could recirculate ice water through the chiller. I added 1.5G of water from the store, checked my gravity (with my hydrometer this time) and it was at 1.044. Blerg. I added the last half gallon and that brought me to 1.042 which looks to be my final OG. Just waiting for the whirlpool to finish now.
19:55 – Finished cleaning and ran off to hockey (late!) . Now, 3 hours from finishing chilling to finishing cleaning sounds like a long time, and it is. Buut, part of my cleaning regimen of late has been to run hot PBW through my pump and whirlpool arm for about 30 minutes and then run hot water through for about 30 minutes. That’s an hour right there, not counting the time to drain and refill/reheat the water. For the PBW part I use the water that I ran through my immersion chiller since it’s already hot. Then, today the clicker for my car alarm died and I had to figure out why. I was hoping it wasn’t from when I dropped it the other day, and luckily it was just the battery. My multimeter said it was putting out .2-.3 volts, it’s a 12V battery. Finding a new battery was a bit of fun and this whole thing killed another 45 minutes or so. Still, this is certainly an area where I need to look at my process.
23:55 – Got back from my hockey game and the wort was down to 53 and 55 in the two fermenters – time to pitch! Just pitched a rehydrated packet of US-05 into each 5G fermenter.
Looking at this brewday, it was kind of a mess. I overshot my gravity, undershot my volume and it took forever. At least I think I can explain most of those. My old cordless drill’s battery died a few months ago and I replaced it with a corded model. Since then my efficiency dropped from 79% to about 68%. I ran the drill faster today, and that may be the reason for the higher efficiency. I also decided to try using BeerAlchemy’s built in water calculator to calculate the water volumes instead of doing the math myself. BeerAlchemy’s grain absorption is hard coded and is quite a bit off on my system, it’s really my only gripe with the software. I think that’s why I missed my volume. I still can’t really get over the fact that I added 3 G of water to this brew and still overshot my gravity by 1.006. Blerg.