BamfBeer Blog

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 :-/

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The original recipe was based on Papazian’s 5-gallon recipe for “Silver Dollar Porter”, modified for a 6.5 gallon batch size.

Here’s the *original* recipe and mash schedule for 6.5 gallons.
10.4 lb 2-row
1.3 lbs munich
0.65 lb crystal
0.65 lb black
0.65 lb chocolate
1.2 oz perle hops (60 minutes)
.5 oz cascade  (60 min)
.75 oz cascade (5 min)
20 minutes @ 122F, 20 minutes @ 150F, 20 minutes @ 158F, mash out @ 170F

Now, here are the actual amounts and times we used.

11lb two-row

1.5lb Munich

.75lb each of black patent, chocolate, and crystal 80L

.5oz Cascade and 1.2 oz Perle hops for 60 minutes

.75oz Cascade for 5 minutes.

Our mash schedule went to hell in a handbasket, unfortunately. Our initial strike temperature was supposed to be 122F. Using ~14lb of grain, we figured we should strike with 3.5 gallons at 135F. That part worked perfectly.

Next, we needed to get to 150F. Our calculations told us to add 3 gallons of water @ 212F (boiling). This only got us to 142. If someone can justify that using our numbers, send mail to bkjones ~at~ gmail. After adding something in the area of 4 gallons of boiling water, we got to 150F. This was a TON more water than we expected to add, and we were unsure what to do because we were supposed to also perform a starch conversion at 158F.

My notes contain a gap of about an hour at this point, probably due to slight panic setting in, and by the time I got back to my laptop we were boiliing. In the future, I think we’ve resolved to just direct-fire the mash tun, as I’m reading all over the place about brewers with setups identical to ours (round metal false bottom in a Sanke keg) that it works fine without scorching the mash.

Once we got to the boil, everything worked wonderfully. We hit an OG of 1.052 as it went into the fermenter on Sept. 16, and a FG reading today of 1.010. It tastes fantastic, and would appear to be already ready for bottling.

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So here are pics from our brew day last week.

Click on the pics to see descriptions and stuff - Enjoy!

http://flickr.com/photos/bkjones/sets/72157594275146311/

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So, as per our usual procedure, Matt put together the recipe for this one, and it looks really good. Also, the little bits of the wort we tasted as it was going into the fermentator were promising!

Here’s the all-grain, 6.5 gallon recipe, followed by a play-by-play of our brew day.
5lb American two-row pale malt

1lb German roasted wheat

8lb German wheat

1.75oz Hallertauer pellet hops

0.75oz Simcoe hops

German Wheat Yeast (smack pack)

The actual step-by-step instructions differ a bit (as you’ll see) with how our day went. Here’s the step-by-step:

mash in with 3.5 gallons @ 130F - rest for 30 min.

raise to 150 with 1.75 gallons @ 200F, rest for 30 min

raise to 158F with 3.5 gallons @ 200F, rest for 10 min.
approx 1.4 gallons will be absorbed by grains

sparge to collect 8.5 gallons.
So there’s the target step-by-step. But, as we all know, stuff happens when you’re homebrewing, decisions get made on-the-fly, new ideas are tested live, things go wrong, times draw out, and all that stuff. So here’s our actual play-by-play.
11:38am Strike 3.5 gal @ 130F
11:42 measured mash @ 122F. Perfect!
~11:56 added 1.8 gal @ 212F

11:59 measured mash @ 149F target is 152F. Turns out the formula we used to figure out how much water to add and at what temperature to get to our target was off. We used 130F as the starting temp instead of the 122F that was the actual starting point.
12:04 We put the mash tun on the burner after measuring mash @ 146.
12:13 took mash off burner reading 150F, put on lid. Hopefully thermometer reads ~152F in two mins.
12:15 reading ~148F.
12:16 put it back on the burner
12:19 took mash off burner, reading ~153.
12:26 mash measuring 153F
12:32 mash measuring 152F
12:51 mash measuring 152F
1:05  now heating water to 170F to sparge with. Mash tun and HLT in place. Since the pump is working well, we used it to recirculate the wort through the mash and set the grain bed. Worked like a charm!
1:52 sparging. Still got a couple gallons to go. Had a leak in the new water tank. Actually, I caused it. I stepped on a hose that was connected to the valve, and it pulled loose. Sparge arm is working well! Pump could probably use a little more downward push from the water tank, but all’s well.
If you’re thinking “Man, that’s a long ass rest at 152″, we thought that too. Then we figured “so what?”. We’ve never been all stressed about long mash rests. The red ale had a long rest too while we had to revert to an all-gravity system when our pump failed. That beer came out beautifully. During all this time, we actually converted a keg into a water boiler to replace the turkey fryer pot we used to use. It actually made things a whole lot easier, and we decided that it was worth the extra mash time. The leak was fixed a few minutes later, and we moved on.

2:08 …and the water tank sprung *another* leak, so we transfered the remaining sparge water (about 3 gallons) into our old 7gal water pot and we just now poured the rest of the water over the bed. Still running clear, and looks like we should be fine. The fittings on the water boiler didn’t get put together quite right because the hole we drilled for them was actually too small. There were about two threads that never came through the hole that we totally didn’t notice until the leak happened. It’ll be fixed for next time. No big deal.
2:11 started boiling the wort. Just now lit the burner. We drew off about 8.25/8.5 gallons of wort.
2:40 We have boiling wort! Added 1 oz 3.7% hellertauer. Almost boiled over before we even added the hops!
3:25 Added .5 oz hallertauer and .25oz 12% simco hops
3:35 added .5oz simco and .25oz hallertauer
3:40 pot is off the fire. Hooked the HLT up to the pump, then the out side of the pump to the wort chiller. We wanted to move the wort through the chiller faster this time, becase last time we just used gravity, and the wort actually got *too* cool! Moving the wort faster worked perfectly. A gravity reading on the out side of the wort chiller read 1.048.
By 4:00, the beer was happily fermenting in the basement.

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Oh man. Where to start. I guess at the beginning.

We went to buy our ingredients, and the guy didn’t have Kent Goldings, or Challenger hops. He also took *forever* to get our order together. Maybe this was an omen, but we didn’t even blink.

We put our grain into the mash tun, heated the strike water, dumped it into the mash tun, and promptly broke our floating thermometer. Luckily, it wasn’t in the mash, so we grabbed another thermometer, and according to that, we hadn’t met our strike temperature. So we put it up on the burner (our mash tun is a keg, so we can heat it directly), and just at that time, Tash came out with our digital Williams Sonoma thermometer, which worked really well…. and told us that we had surpassed our strike temp!! The first thermometer, we discovered, was stuck and wouldn’t go past 150. Dammit. Oh well. At this point, if that was all that went wrong, we’d consider ourselves lucky.

The mash sat at the proper temperature for the proper amount of time, and then it was time to start the sparge process. We heated up the sparge water, and set things up to pump from the water boiler to the sparge arm, and the pump was useless. We hadn’t set things up the way that I had done in my pump tests, so the pump wasn’t getting a constant gravity feed. We reverted to using gravity to move the sparge water. Even that was really far more difficult than it needed to be. The siphon gods were *really* not with us, and once we *did* get the water moving, one of the stoppers that closes the ends of the Phil’s sparger arm fell off.

Oh yeah, somewhere in there, I was trying to cut a hose for something and sliced my thumb wide open. This put me out of commission for some time, leaving Matt to do a couple of pretty back-breaking things by himself. No bueno.

So there’s water going in and we realize that our false bottom is not connected to the spout, so nothing is able to leave the mash tun. We had to turn it on its side and reconnect it. This was not possible, and so we had to transfer everything to another vessel, field-fabricate and sanitize a proper connection, and then retransfer everything back into the mash tun so we could run off the wort.

We did finally get the wort run off into the hot liquor tank, and we did the boil, and now we’re ready to put it through the wort chiller and into the fermentor. No go. Our racking cane got clogged, the wort chiller got clogged, the tubing got clogged, and we had to restart the siphon so many times that I’m sure Matt and I spit at *least* a gallon of wort on my driveway.

Once the fermenter was about half full, and we looked in to see nothing but hop leaves and about 3 inches of beer left in the HLT, we figured after all of this, we were only going to come out with about 4 gallons of wort, it was probably contaminated from trying to recover from the various clogs, siphoning way too much, etc., it was probably not going to taste right, and so we called it our very first wasted batch.

It’s the kind of brew day that makes you just want to run to the store for your beer. Not a single thing worked right. Absolute misery.

*** Matt’s Viewpoint on the “Day that will live in infamy”***

Yeah it was a comedy of errors. In all the years I have brewed I NEVER had a brew day like this and I never lost a batch. I guess it was bound to happen. This whole fiasco really just drives home the fact that we need to do some finalizing features on our system. For one thing we need to put a throughwall ball cock on the hlt to easy use with the pump and have premeasured, cut tubing so we don’t have to do it while brewing. Hence preventing Jonesy (or even myself) slicing off a didgit and looking like a shop teacher with butter knife sharp knives trying to cut foodsafe tubing. Our system is about 90% there and after a few slight additions we will have a lean mean system.

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Some prep work had to be done on brew day. This is my handy work - a hole cut in the top of a keg that we’re using for our boil kettle. Don’t do it this way. I was under pressure to get it done, so I used a sawzall, which doesn’t cut in circles. Either use a jigsaw with a metal-cutting blade, or (much preferred) get a welder to do it with a plasma cutter. Regardless, don’t forget to deburr the edges and clean the keg to insure that there are no metal shavings in the finished product. I washed this one keg out probably 5 times before I was confident that there was nothing left.

Another hack courtesy of me. This was our old boil kettle, but we decided to use it as our new mash tun, replacing a very, very old coleman cooler. I just cut that notch into it so that the false bottom (also new) would fit in the hole. I then hooked up the false bottom to the valve on the outside, and it was just about set.

Matt was in charge of wiring up the new pump, which took some time as well, so I didn’t feel too bad about taking so long cutting and cleaning kegs and stuff. This really should’ve been done and tested during the week, but you know how laziness can be. Here, Matt goes over the quite obviously copious documentation for the March pump. When it was all done, I have to say, Matt did a pretty masterful wiring job.

With pretty much everything in place, we dumped in our grains, and started heating our striking water. You can almost guess from the pic that we’re using 2-row pale malt, along with medium and dark crystal malt. If you want more details, search for “red ale” on this site. It’s in the recipe section.

So we struck and held the mash at 149F for 20 minutes. It was at about this point that we started finding that the recipe was off in some water calculations, and assumed we were directly heating the mash tun, so we made a couple of adjustments, and quickly went on our way to heating up the water to bring the mash up to mash-out temperature.

At this point, we also discovered that the pump was dead, and so we went from a really clean setup to pure insanity in moments, because we had to revert to an all-gravity system in seconds if possible. We did it in minutes. Not bad on zero notice. The bucket on the top held sparge water. We stacked up the two kegs you see there, so the water went from the bucket, to the top keg in the keg stack, and then finally out to our boil kettle (not shown), which was sitting on the ground. Ugh.

LESSON LEARNED: Gravity Never Breaks. Also, the mash is a fairly time/temperature-sensitive stage, so you should be prepared to rely on gravity at a moments notice if necessary.

So we finally made it to the boil. Seemed like it took forever, but in the end, we really didn’t lose too much time. Our new Phil’s Sparge Arm worked flawlessly, but I guess we were so caught up in marveling at it, cursing the busted pump, recovering from the whole meltdown, etc., that we nevergot a picture of it in action. Next time! Anyway, we added the hops and stuff, and finally got to relax a little bit.

While the boil was happening, another thing we had to revert to all-gravity was routing the boiling wort through the wort chiller and into the fermentor. This wasn’t too bad thanks in part to the fact that the wort chiller is very small. If it was a counterflow system or an immersion system, we would’ve had bigger problems getting one vessel high enough over the others, and it would’ve taken longer to hack it all together. However, the setup you see in this picture worked flawlessly. You can just about see the chiller sitting near the base of the keg. Go to the “reviews” section to see a review of the chiller.

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