Winter means a short break to regroup
Since we have a brewery setup that requires us to brew outdoors, and since that setup really is NOT optimized for cold weather, Bamf Beer breaks in the winter to regroup and plan for the upcoming brewing season.
Our last brew was the Bamf Porter, and we brewed that only like a week or two after the Hefeweizen. September was a busy month. On October 21st, we had the first annual Oktoberfest, and it went well. We unloaded a decent bit of our homebrew, and had our fill of German food. Nobody there was German, but how can you say no to sausage and kraut? A good time was had by all.
Shortly after, I received a ThruMometer for my birthday, which is a great complement to our wort chiller. We’ll be able to see the temperature of the wort as it leaves the chiller and adjust the pressure of the water coming from the hose to get just the right temp for our yeast. That has been the only addition to our setup.
There will be little tweaks to our procedure, though - and that doesn’t involve any new equipment. We found on our last couple of batches that we missed our original gravity pretty significantly. Turns out it didn’t matter much for the last two beers because they were heavy enough anyway that the resulting beer was perfectly drinkable. We hadn’t left the ballpark, but we were off.
We attributed this to a couple of things. First, we should be pulling more from our mash tun. We were using markers on our boiler (another keg) that we thought were halfway marks. Well, they weren’t halfway marks. Important lesson: Everything needs to be measured and marked by the brewers. The second thing is we need to either boil longer or more vigorously. We really don’t seem to lose very much volume during our boil at *all*. The only notable volume loss is when we leave the boiler, and that’s because we haven’t been really working at getting the maximum amount of wort out of the boiler.
We’ll get there. In the meantime, the beer is great. We’d just like to be able to hit our mark with a little more accurracy.
If time allows, maybe we’ll brew something simple some time in the coming weeks. We’ll let you know if it actually happens 