Brew Day: Full Sail Amber Clone

First brew of the season, and also the first time I (brian) have brewed completely solo. My wife, Natasha, helped me multitask more effectively by doing lots of the cleaning and temp-reading chores, and generally keeping me company.

Quick Summary

There were a few new additions to the equipment list this time around: new quick disconnects, new burner, new thrumometer, a new hack for the bottom of the boiler, etc. The burner and the quick disconnects worked wonderfully. Couldn’t ask for more. The hack for the boiler was fantastic at getting a lot more of the wort out of the boiler, but it wasn’t the greatest filter I’ve ever seen – still a big improvement over our last batch. Overall, equipment wasn’t bad. I had some pump troubles – I had to reprime the damn thing like 5 times during the sparge, but this was relatively minor compared to issues we’ve had in the past.

The big disappointment for me was that, once again, things went awry during the sparge. I’ve come to loathe sparging, because it is *always* where things go wrong. Once I started running off the wort, and started having trouble repriming the pump, I realized that if I just added some water to the pot, it would increase the siphon pressure and I wouldn’t need to keep repriming the damn pump. But how much to add? And now what? I’m supposed to completely put my sparge on hold while I go heat up some more sparge water?

For the record, whoever got the idea that a pump that a) needs to be primed and b) isn’t drip-safe is good for homebrewing is,(forgive me), a moron. Somebody please find a peristaltic pump that doesn’t cost a million bucks that takes 3/8″ diameter tubing and is food safe to 212F. Please. Really. I’m not kidding.

In the end, I wound up with a pretty dark, heavy beer in my fermenter, and it wasn’t 5 gallons. I added exactly one gallon of tap water to the fermenter just before putting it in the basement. We’ll see how it goes.

All the blood and gore

First, let me give a shout out to my new homebrew supply shop, Wine Hops & Barley, in Feasterville, PA. I’d link to their web site, but there’s really nothing there to see. Aside from that issue, though, it’s a nice, clean place, with great people and a damn fine collection of both ingredients and equipment. There are a few quirky things missing – for example, on the ingredient side, they only carry White Labs yeast. On the equipment side, they had only a 1000ml flask, and they didn’t have any stir plates at all. They *did* have the Johnson Controls temperature control, though, and I got it!

Anyway, I’m including a quick pic of the inside of the place as proof that homebrew supply shop does not need to look like the home of your friendly neighborhood cat lady.

The Mash

We got started early. The grains got wet at 9:54AM. The water was a little above 171F which is what was called for, but I figured it was only a degree or two and we’d be ok. This is based on past experience with out mash tun: it doesn’t really hold a temperature well for very long. However, I had made a new insulating jacket for the mash tun while the strike water was heating up, and as it turns out, that thing made an enormous difference. I overshot the temperature, left it alone for 15 minutes, came back, and hadn’t lost *any* heat! I was in shock. I had to remove the lid and the insulation, and it cooled down pretty quickly. Once it got to the target temp of 150F, I put everything back on and it stayed at 150F the rest of the time. It worked really well.

Oh yeah – if you’re looking to do this to your mash tun, that insulation came from Home Depot or Lowe’s (I don’t remember which). It’s called “Reflectix(tm)”. I got it because it doesn’t have any exposed fiberglass or cotton fiber that can either catch fire, get messy, or get embedded in my skin. This worked really well.

While the mash rests…

So, while the grains were resting at-or-near their target temperature, I was able to think a little more about the boiler. Matt had fashioned some copper tubing into a semi-circle last time around, such that when you looked into the boiler, it had the shape of a question mark. This wasn’t a complete failure, but we weren’t really happy about it. Mostly, we just wanted to get more wort out of the boiler, and we felt like we left a good bit in the boiler last batch using that tube. This time around, I just did the old “z-tube”. I took some tubing, bent it in the shape of a “z”, so the top of the z connected to the weldless fitting, and the bottom of the z sat roughly 1″ above the center of the bottom of the vessel.

Great, but what about filtering? Well, I had some copper Chore Boys I bought at the grocery store (near the cleaning solvents and mops and stuff, if memory serves). I took one and played with it for a minute before I realized that this thing can actually be kinda pulled apart to form a little copper mesh pouch! Neat! So I took a hose clamp, and used it to form a neck for the pouch.

Now it was as simple as just sliding this on the copper tube in the bottom of the boiler, and tightening the hose clamp. Keep in mind that you have to use a hose clamp one size up from what you would normally put on the copper tube because you need room for the copper mesh.

This solution actually worked pretty darn well, but just in case, I figured I’d use one of those reusable nylon hop bags instead of letting whole hops just fly around in my boiler. In retrospect, I think it might’ve been better to let the hops run free, and they would’ve acted as a better filter for the finer sediment than the Chore Boy. Maybe next time.

I admit I was a little nervous about using whole hops. We usually use pellets and have never had a problem using pellets, but the selection of whole hops at the LHBS (Local Home Brew Supply) was so good I couldn’t pass it up. They had exactly the hops I wanted, so I just got the whole hops.

The Sparge

Anyway, back to the mash and sparge. My recipe calculator called for sparging with 4.0 gallons of water. This was a single infusion mash, and I had already added about 3.6 gallons to the mash. In the end, sparging with 4 gallons of water should leave me with around 6.25 gallons of wort, but the problem was with my setup…

We have a keg we can use as a hot liquor tank to boil water. However, that’s a big damn vessel to boil 4 gallons of water in. Also, because of the current way it’s configured, you never get *all* of the water out of it… so how much *can* you get? Well, that’s a great question. A question I don’t want to have to think about on brew day. What I really need to do is fashion almost exactly what I did for the boiler bottom and put one in the hot liquor tank. That would rock, especially since I don’t need to worry about filtering with the Chore Boy.

So instead of the keg, I used our old water pot. The one that came with our old turkey fryer. It’s perfectly fine. It’s a smaller vessel – about 7-8 gallons in size, and a little less bulky so it’s a little more easily handled by one person. This, of course, meant I was going to be siphoning, because this pot doesn’t have a spigot. *sigh*.

So, no big deal, I sanitized my racking cane, some tubing, etc. I put the pot on the workbench, I started the siphon (with a tube that I dedicated to starting siphons so I could connect a sanitized one after it was started – I love quick disconnects!), and started pumping.

Now…. check out the setup in the pic. The water is in the smaller pot. It’s siphoned all the way to the ground, where the pump is. The pump is pushing it all the way up to the sparge arm sitting on top of the mash tun. See the tubing going toward the L-connector at the top of the keg? That’s where the water is getting pumped to. Judging by my position in the picture (I’m 5’10″), I’d say the pump has to push the water about 5’2″, almost directly up. The pump’s advertised “head” is 12ft. This all went swimmingly well until roughly half (I’m kinda guessing) of the water was gone.

At that point, things got really sluggish. I don’t care about sluggish. I don’t care about a slow sparge in this scenario. But then it completely stopped. I undid the quick disconnect on the “out” side of the pump, and I was able to basically act as a stand-in peristaltic pump to get the siphon going again. That was really cool to see that work – but I wish I didn’t have to. Anyway, I connected it back up, and it pumped for a minute more and… blech. Stopped again. The more water that left the smaller pot, the more it seemed I had to reprime the pump. Also, it’s worth noting that I use very little spare tubing in my pump setups. The tubing has *some* room so it can be bumped without causing a chain reaction that puts 170F water all over me, but it’s not winding and looping around.

Questions I need to answer now to figure out why the pump needed to be reprimed are:

1. As the water level in the small pot decreases, does this affect the siphon? Does the pressure change? I didn’t think it should.
2. Is it possible that a 12ft head measured with water could be cut in *half* by beer (which has a higher specific gravity)?
3. Is there anything I can look at, monitor, do to figure out why the pump would stop pushing fluid? Sometimes it looks like everything is fine – there’s fluid in the tubes leading into and out of the pump, but no movement. Why would that be?

One theory I have is that there’s some resistance to flow caused by the sparge arm. Enough to create an *effective* resistance greater than the head pressure, causing the pump to reach its “shut off” head pressure. I’m not sure how to test this conclusively, but I guess I could do the same sparge setup without the arm and see how it goes. This might make *some* sense if for no other reason there’s a change in the tubing diameter the water is going through. It’s going through 3/8″ ID tubing until it gets to the sparge arm, at which point it’s going into a much smaller diameter tubing before being sprayed onto the mash. Also, it’s being sprayed through very tiny little holes in said small-diameter tubing. In case you’ve never seen a “Phil’s Sparge Arm”, here’s a pic of mine in action. Yes, that arm is rotating.

I like the sparge arm, but it’s not what I’d call “necessary”. I’m sure we could probably build something just as useful. But this is ready-made, and not very expensive, and if you have a steady supply of water, it’ll run all dang day.

So here’s the kicker. At the end of the sparge, I’m looking down into the boiler, I’m seeing that I don’t have enough wort in there. I’m looking at the mash tun, and I’m stressing out. The pump isn’t doing crap at this point, so I started adding some water. Then I realized I’d have no idea how much I was adding (I wasn’t adding any measured amount – I was just tossing some water into the small pot). Then I guess I got really stressed out about how little wort was in the boiler, and how little appeared to be left in the mash tun…. I dumped the rest of the water into the mash tun… all at once. I’ve never done this before, so I figured “it’ll either be fine, or I’ll learn exactly why you don’t ever want to do that”. I drained off the beer, and it looked darker than usual all the way until it stopped, which would seem to me like we left some sugars in the mash tun Meanwhile, even after doing this the wort level in the boiler looked low.

The Boil

The boil went fine! The burner is fantastic. It has a really nice adjustable regulator so you can play with the air/gas mixture, so your flame can always be nice and blue. It’s stronger than our old burner too. I don’t know what our old burner’s rating was, but this one is either 50 or 55,000 BTU. The wort started boiling in record time – even faster than I thought – and I thought it *would* be fast because of the low level!

I also used a hop bag, as I noted earlier, and that was fine too. For easy removal from the boil I took a straight copper racking tube, and just tangled the drawstring around the spring end of the racking tube to make a little fishing pole.

Doing this changes how I do my hop additions. Generally, if there’s an ounce that gets boiled for 45 minutes, and an ounce that gets boiled for 15 minutes, I’d add my 45 minute hops, wait 30 minutes, and then add the 15 minute hops. Then everything finishes at the same time. With a hop bag, I put the 45 minute hops in the bag for 45 minutes, took them out, and then put in the 15 minute hops. I have to say that, even though it probably sounds like a bit of a headache, it was really surprisingly easy to use the hop bag.

The boil was especially vigorous, and gave off far more steam than usual. I’m sure I lost twice as much volume as we normally do during the boil. This is good news. I had been hoping for this, really, because I had read a good bit about what to expect from a boil, and how it should generally go, and I didn’t feel like our boil was really “there” yet.

Into the fermentor!

Finally. This went off without a hitch as well. The way this worked is this: The boiler sat on the work table, and drained from its spigot down to the pump, which is still on the floor. The pump pushes the wort up to the chiller, which is sitting on the work table. From there, it’s out to the thrumometer and into the fermentor.

The thrumometer pic (right) is a good one. In the background you can see the pump on the ground (with a box over the housing because it’s not drip-proof). The tube going to the inlet (left side) of the pump is 212F. then it gets pumped up to the chiller sitting on the workbench and through the thrumometer, by which time it’s 66F. Actually, it was 62F, but I turned down the flow rate of the water on the garden hose (using the hose connector’s adjustor, which you can barely see in the left pic – the hose connector is the black and green one).

So, finally, here’s a shot (left) of how much was left in the boiler. Not much, which is great. And since I used the hop bag, there were no hops to worry about. I had to turn the pump off when I started seeing sediment, so the filtering power isn’t great, but if I can get this low before I see any sediment, then that works for me. Including what was left in the tubing and the boiler, I probably wasted a quart or less of actual wort.

On the down side of things, I don’t believe I got enough wort out of the whole process. So I added a gallon of water to the fermentor before I put it in the basement. I’ve never done *that* before either. We’ll see how it goes :-/