November Brewday – RyePA
I’m taking this week off from work in order to use up some vacation hours that I’ve accrued. This gave me an opportunity to brew twice in a month for the first time since I went back to school. I really love an IPA when the nights are cool, but I was also considering brewing my Stuck in Lodi Rye recipe since the last two batches came up infected and I’ve really missed this beer. What to do? Combine the two: RyePA! I started off looking to brew Denny Conn’s classic RyePA recipe which I’ve brewed before. A couple of things happened: I wanted to use up some inventory, and the inventory in the Beer Alchemy software I use was a bit off. So I ended up with this recipe. I’m sure it will still be delicious.
10:14 - Mashed in, 153F, 5.2pH. I really need to make sure I get my coffee before I get to this point, I transferred the hot liquor to my mash tun but forgot to give it time to absorb some of the heat before adding my grains. I mashed in quite a bit warm, at around 158F, but I used some ice to get the temp down to 153 in only a few minutes. This required some vigorous stirring, which led to a little bit of a mess (nothing serious):
10:30 – Got the hot liquor for the sparge heating up and the fermenter on the burner getting sanitized.
11:20 – Started the first runoff and added the First Wort Hops.
11:44 – Started the second batch vorlauf and runoff into the kettle.
12:09 – Kettle is full and just a little over 200F. I better get back out there quick! I didn’t want to say anything earlier, but I’m really happy that lautering went ok. The last time I brewed a RyePA was one of my worst brewing experiences, I had a stuck mash and had to lauter the whole batch through kitchen strainers. Whew!
Update: Some day I’ll learn my lesson about walking away from 200 degree wort. Today is not that day.
13:18 – Killed the burner and added the knockout hops. Started the chiller.
13:52 – Wort at 100F, switched chiller over to ice water.
14:19 – Wort at approximately 70F, pulled chiller and started whirlpool.
14:47 – Wort racked into fermenter.
16:31 – Finished cleaning up. Not as good as last time, but still not too shabby.
The new chiller system I setup for my fermenter is working great. It’s pulled the wort from about 72F down to about 64F in about an hour. I’m confident it could go even faster if I just used more ice, but this is more than sufficient for right now. Here’s what it looks like:
I really took a lot of pictures today… Anyway, I missed my gravity a bit getting only about 74% mash efficiency. I ended up at 1.069, but I don’t think that’s going to matter much in the final beer.