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.

11:07 – Dough-In.  130°F

11:27 – Added the step infusion in a few parts, which I think was a bad idea since some of the water probably cooled down while I was stirring the mash to check the temp.  Next time I will trust the calculations and just add it all at once.  Mash is at 144°F now, I’m heating up another 3 quarts to step up to my desired temp of 148°F.

11:36 – Stepped temperature up to 148°F

12:37 - Started the first batch runoff.

13:23 – Runoff is going really slowly, but the second runoff is going and the kettle is on the burner.  Wort is still flowing from the mash tun, but it’s not going very fast at all.

14:11 – While I was checking the runoff I noticed that the flame from my burner was a little low and sure enough I was about out of propane.  I just got back from filling up, I got 4.7 gallons in a 20 lb tank.  At least I ran out before I’d added the 60 minute hops.  The wort’s at about 180°F now and the burner’s going at full bore.  This did seem to give plenty of time for the runoff to finish.

14:20 – Got back outside from grabbing the camera just in the nick of time to see this:

Of course, since I wanted a picture of it, I didn’t get the burner stopped quite in time, but this is about the most minor boilover I’ve ever had:

11:05 – Mashed in a few minutes ago and just realized that I haven’t set a timer. 148°F, 5.2pH.

12:09 – Finished my first vorlauf and started running off my first batch sparge.

12:43 – The second batch sparge is running off now and the kettle is on the burner.

13:21 – Let the hot break die down and added the 60 minute hops.

14:21 – Added the knockout hops and started the chiller.  Kegs are sanitized and I’m going to start filling them now.
15:00 – Just finished filling the 3 kegs of Belgian Pale Ale from the Brue Day.  The wort is down to about 88°F and I only just now switched it over to ice water.  I would have done this sooner I think if I hadn’t been busy filling kegs.  Now I just need to get the fermenters cleaned, filled and pitched.

15:14 -Wort is down to 68°F, starting whirlpool.

16:29 – Got a bit lazy there, but both fermenters are now oxygenated (first time!) and pitched.  When I was just outside I noticed that there was a sheet of what looked almost just like gelatin on the side of my kettle.  I’ve seen the strands of hot break before, but nothing quite like this.  I guess it’s probably cold break, pretty neat stuff.

I slept in pretty late since I’ve been getting hardly any sleep for the last week or so, and finally got started around noon.

I decided to go with a pale ale today.  So far in 2009 I’ve been in a session beer kind of mood and I’m sticking with that for this beer.  It may be a bit on the big side for a session beer, but I still think it qualifies.  I’m also using up some hops that have been in my freezer for a while.

12:55 – Mashed in @ 151°F and 5.25pH.  Then took off to go get more propane.

14:48 – Basically done sparging, wort’s at about 180°F and I’m getting back outside so I don’t have another boilover.

15:15 – Added my 60 minute hops – some Chinook pellets.  Time to start cleaning.

14:18 – Killed the burner and threw in my knockout hops.  I won’t be starting the chiller for a few more minutes.  This is a strategy that I tried once a long time ago with a pale ale and it came out with a hop flavor and aroma that I really liked, so I’ve stuck with it.  I like to let the knockout hops sit for between 15-30 minutes before starting the chiller.  I’ll probably be on the short side of that today.

14:32 – Started the chiller…

17:09 – Just got back from the store to grab some ice to run through my immersion chiller.  It’s at 90ºF now.

17:35 - So much for this being  nice session beer.  I just took my grvity reding nd it showed tht I’m t 1.060.  Bummer, but mybe I finlly fixed my efficiency problem with my new drill.  Oh, nd one of the keys on my keybord isn’t working for some reson … cn you guess which one??

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.