Brewday – Bitter American
I’m back from China and have basically no school for the rest of September. I got a chance to brew yesterday and decided to go for a nice little session beer. I’m calling it Bitter American.
I managed to get things started fairly early for me. Using my new bucket heater to get the mash water heating while I was still sleeping and to let me heat both my “mash out” and batch sparge additions really helped too.
9:50 – Mashed in – 151F
10:56 – Started the first runoff
11:10 – Started the second runoff
11:45 – Reached a boil, added the 60 minute hops.
12:45 – Turned off the boil. Waited a few minutes while I did some cleanup before starting the chiller.
That’s where I stopped keeping track of time. As usual, I got pretty lazy around this point and didn’t finish my cleanup until around 4:00PM. That’s still quite a bit earlier than normal. I pretty much hit my target gravity, coming in around 1.036 (maybe a bit higher like 1.037). This was a nice brewday and most everything went really smoothly. The biggest problem came up when I went to rehydrate my yeast and only found 1 packet of US-05. I thought about splitting that packet between the 2 fermenters, but then I remembered I had a 500g brick of Windsor that’s been sitting in my fridge for a little over a year. I would normally never use Windsor, but if it would ever be appropriate in one of my beers, this is probably the one. I went ahead and measured about 11g of the brick into some boiled and cooled water to rehydrate and tossed the remaining 489g or so into the trash.