First Brew Day of 2006 – Red Ale – Part 1
Well, we’re boiling the wort as I type this. It’s been a rough road to get to the boil, truthfully.
The main problem is that our pump was bad. We ordered a March pump from Northern Brewer, and it just didn’t do anything at all. Nothing. I called NB support, and lo and behold, the guy knew a thing or two about the product! We went through a quick test while I was on the phone with him, and told him about our setup and stuff, and in the end, it couldn’t be determined that we had done anything wrong, and our pump test failed, so he said he’d send out a new pump along with a shipping label so we could send the old pump back. Perfect! You can’t always expect every single product shipped to be perfect, but when a problem arises, this is how it should be handled.
So we had to quickly revert to an all-gravity system. We whipped out the tables and chairs, and an extra 5-gallon bucket to sparge with, and we were on our way.
I’ll say this: the one new part of the system that worked pretty much flawlessly was Phil’s Sparge Arm. I feel a little jipped because we could’ve probably come up with a similar solution for about half the price, but hey, now we don’t have to do that, and the thing works. The nice part, too, is that we can easily replace pretty much anything on it that ever breaks.
The other thing we learned today is that, when you’re doing 5-6 gallon batches using all-grain setups, you really need to develop your *own* recipe and step-by-step. We wanted to keep things simple on the first brew of the season, so we went with a recipe and step-by-step from a magazine. Bad move. They made all kinds of assumptions about our ingredients and our setup that just weren’t true. For example, we have a single mash/lauter tun, and we don’t heat our mash on the burner. For another, our hops, though they were the same name, had 9.3% acid, not 8%. I don’t fault the magazine — they can’t account for every possible variable. It’s just another lesson learned. We’ve never really gone by a recipe out of a magazine or off the ‘net before.
More later.