I am writing these old embarrassing stories first. It is odd, I guess that I feel it’s best to get this kind of stuff off my chest first. Nobody is perfect, and we all have made mistakes. I tend to remember these brewing days better, as the failures have helped to define why I do certain processes now. These stories certainly help to improve my writing, which probably needs some help, and no pictures this time, as I was not thinking of starting a blog yet…

By this time, the hot liquor tank has been sitting over a burner all day, and is now in the 190 degree range.  Because I wasn’t paying attention, I went ahead and started to fly-sparge, only realizing once about 5 gallons is in the boil kettle that my sparge temp was too high.  I stopped the fly-sparge and drained the mash, deciding to batch sparge instead.  Once the 190 degree temp water that had made it into the mashtun was drained through the grain bed, I thought my best option was to add cold water to the liquor tank and allow the temp to settle prior to  running it through the grain.  While filling the tank with ground temp water from the hose, the boil kettle came to a boil, with about 5 gallons in it.  The boil kettle burner was on full blast, because I was expecting to fly […]

I am going to be a pro, I thought to myself Saturday morning as I hauled hot water by the 5 gallon bucket from the bathroom tub faucet out to the garage and poured it into my hot liquor tank.  I had gotten up early and was too excited to eat any breakfast.  I fired up the burner on the liquor tank, and hauled enough water to fill it (14.5 gallons).  I estimated a campdon tablet was good enough for my very soft water with only chloramine in it.  The mashtun piping was primed by opening the liquor tank ball valve and allowing the water to flow through all the lines until it started to “underlet” into the mashtun.  This is basically a way to let all the air escape out of the lines and pipes through the system.  If there was an air bubble it could get pulled into […]

This is a 12 gallon recipe I was inspired to brew after dabbling around with some SMaSH recipes calling for Citra and Simcoe hops.  As a warning to the reader, this brew was a nightmare of poor planning, execution, leverage of wisdom, and my time…