old brew - new techniques

So about 2 months ago I broke out an old recipe to try out some new equipment / techniques. The recipe is for a brown ale, which was the first beer I ever brewed. I went with the brown because 1) I haven’t made one in at least a year and 2) I had some leftover ingredients I wanted to use up. The latter reason caused me to substitute in some Belgian specialty grains rather than the typical crystal malt, which was an experiment in of itself. I also wanted to try partial mashing again, which I tried for the first time with the hefeweizen. The real thing I wanted to do, however, was test some new equipment I have.


Partial Mash - So after being reasonably please with the hefe, I decided to try the partial mash again. The process I used was to I hold the wert at set temperatures for a specified amount of time on the stove at low or no heat with the lid on. I stirred and checked the temps every 5 minutes. The tempurature ranges and times were 130 - 135F for 30min, 145 - 149F for 45min and 155F for 10min. The process seemed to work well with temps varying only a couple of degrees over the entire time period. One thing I noticed was that by holding the grains in the wert for almost three times longer that just steeping is that more grains tend to escape the grain-sock. To combat this I started straining the wert before boiling.




Turkey friar – I purchased this puppy during the last holiday season when it was on sale at target for $20. I bought it for one main reason. Eventually I want to at least try all-grain brewing. To all-grain brew, you need a stock pot that will hold all 5 gallons of wert because you have to boil it all at once. That means I need something bigger than my 5 gal pot, and the 7.5 gal kettle that came with the turkey friar is the perfect size. I hooked the friar up to my propane tank outside, filled it up, fired it up, cracked open a beer and enjoyed the show. Brewing beer outdoors is something everyone should try - there is just something strangely natural about it. The friar worked great. It produced great rolling boil and didn’t scorch the kettle.




Carboy – I got a new carboy for my birthday from noel’s folks. It’s a 6gal glass carboy, which leaves plenty of head room for respiration. Getting the beer in was no problem. My airlock / stopper I got when I borrowed brian’s carboy worked fine with it. Watching the respiration and fermentation was awesome. The first day the yeast activity was churning the beer causing huge chunks of trub to zooming up and down. The second and third days things slowed down but there was still visible movement, with little eruptions occurring from the bottom. After that the stratification began as all the suspended trub began to settle out. It was quite entertaining. Getting the beer out was a bit harder than getting it in, so I’ll have to rethink my siphoning, but all in all it was a great experiment and I think I’ll be using the carboy generally from here on out.



Since brewing I have kegged and tasted product and plan to serve it at the Halloween product. After letting others sample I will post how I think my experiments worked out.