Brew Report #5 - 20th Brew Follow Up

What a fun and crazy brew. For the most part things worked out well. Had plenty of help doing the 2 min additions. Thanks Scott for your attentiveness and John for measuring the Dixie cups. Lets revisit some of the specifics…

For some reason we had a mysterious expanding mash. What I mean by this is that the grain bed never really settled and basically expanded equally over the existing volume. We have had this happen once before and I’m still not certain why is happens. Having the grain bed settled is important because it helps with the efficiency of the sparge, which in this case didn’t turn out so well. We collected 14 gallons into the boil and the running still remained close to 1.030 sg. Given that the OG ended up being 1.093 sg, this tells me we had great extract efficiency but our sparge was not very efficient. The other factor that may be involved is the amount of wort boiled off. I predicted a large boil off because of the 120 minutes, but its currently unclear how much volume is in the fermentor.

Since the gravity ended a little lower than expected I may have to add a little dry malt extract to some of the sugar additions to balance things out. I prefer to have at least 60% of the sugar from malt based sources.

So the hopback addition worked as expected, but the one down side to this was the disconnect in pressure. I was expecting that because we were without the bazooka screen in the bottom of the boil, the pump would pull 98% of the liquid from the boil. Unfortunately because the pump wasn’t directly connected to the boil output there wasn’t enough pressure to keep the flow going once the level dropped below the dip tube. The result of this was me dumping the remains onto the fermentor and making a huge mess (picture to your right)

The fermentor is going nicely now. Something like 3-4 bubbles a second with is really good. I’m keeping the fermentation around 72 to ensure good strong yeast growth and fermentation. Also, the high gravity starter is going nicely, so it should be ready when expected.

I will be updating the brew history page daily for this one, so check back frequently to see the status.

The pictures have been posted as well. Enjoy.