Milling Grain for Home Brewing

My first home-milled malted barley. (I feel like a proud parent!)

Now that I have grown accustomed to all-grain brewing, it was only a matter of time before I bought a grain mill. I had mail ordered a kit where I suspect my mash efficiency was diminished by a bad milling. I had seen my local homebrew shop's hand-drill powered mill sometimes work, sometimes not. And a couple of weeks ago I found a great online shop in Portland, F.H. Steinbart Company, who free-ship organic grains to Washington State. But, since they don't offer milling of their organic Gambrinus Pilsner malt, Santa decided to bring me a mill this year.

My Crankandstein 3D homebrewing mill with hopper and platform.

The consensus among homebrew authors, forum contributors, YouTube video bloggers, and product web sites, is that the best milling comes from opening the barley's husk without shredding, then cracking/smashing the inner meat; not making a lot of powder, and not leaving a lot of un-crushed large pieces. Historically, the mill that had the overall best reviews was the Phil Mill, a small hand-cranked single roller & curved plate combination, which, sadly is no longer manufactured. Food processors, blenders, and rolling pins get universally poor reviews. There are a lot of two-roller systems on the market, starting at around $100: Millar's Barley Mill, Schmidling MaltMill, the Cereal Killer Grain Mill, and the Barley Crusher Malt Mill. There are even designs for build-your-own systems like the Beerbarian Malt Mill.

I found more advanced three-roller designs from Monster Brewing Hardware, and Crankandstein to have the most thought-out approach to milling grains for homebrewing. (I chose the Crankandstein for it's sturdy and beautiful design, and for the killer hopper made from what looks like a galvanized poultry watering tank.) The beauty of the three-roller design is that the top two rollers are factory set at .070" uniform spacing, perfect for pressing open the husks and softening the whole grains. The bottom roller is adjustable by .005" spacings so the second pass pulverizes the grain starch, but leaves the split husks whole. With the right adjustments, you get what should be a perfect, and consistent mash.

My eight gallon mash tun/boil kettle at capacity.

Having achieved a perfect crush, a roomier mash tun is next on my wish list. If I plan to brew higher gravity recipes I'll need to either scale up my mashes or scale down my batches.

5 Gallon Used Bourbon Barrels

Freshly dumped bourbon barrels from Woodinville Whiskey Co.

My local Washington bourbon distillery has the perfect thing for adding bourbon barrel aged goodness to your next 5 gallon batch of beer. Here's the text from their website:

"All of our barrels have been used for just one aging cycle of our bourbon whiskey. This single use provides the oak with a rich bourbon flavor while still maintaining plenty of oak extracts for future use. The smaller barrel sizes also provide a greater surface area to volume ratio (more wood in contact with liquid) which results in increased extraction. The barrels can be used for aging beers, cocktails, bitters, sauces, or whatever you can dream up!"

5 GALLON USED BOURBON BARREL

$120

Fresh Hop Aroma Tea

A "tea" made with fresh hops and nearly finished wort.

In the Best of Brew Your Own - Hop Lover's Guide, Chris Colby & Don Million have an article on fermenting & conditioning that describes making a hop aroma tea in place of dry hopping or kraüsen hopping. The resulting "tea" is supposed to contribute a more intense hop aroma and flavor than dry hopping would, with no bitterness, since the hops do not boil. One would normally use the hop aroma tea technique during secondary fermentation. But with about 5 oz of fresh hops left over from my one pound order, a tea should be a good way to capture as much aroma and flavor as possible before the hops begin to fade.

Here are the steps to making a hop aroma tea:

1. Normally you would make 2 qts. of wort, SG 1.005 - 1.015 for a 5 gallon batch. In my case, I tapped boiling wort directly from the brew kettle with 10 minutes left in the boil. I ran the wort into a sanitized French press coffee maker filled with fresh hops.
2. Normally you would let the hops steep, then press and let cool before adding to a beer in secondary fermentation. In my case, I let the cones steep the remaining 10 minutes of the main boil, then pressed and poured into the brew kettle at flameout.

Brewing With Fresh Hops - Chinook IPA

Just in time for the arrival of my freshly picked pound bag of Chinook hops at Mountain Homebrew & Wine, I found a reasonable sounding recipe in the iBrewMaster App for a single  hop Chinook IPA.

Each Chinook cone was about the size of one of my thumbs. The bag wafted intense piney/resiny aromas. 

The product description for the beer comes from a Northern Brewer kit:

"This American IPA has a relatively modest gravity and an immodest hop character derived entirely from a single hop variety. Chinook hops have long been used by US brewers for bittering additions, but their intense aroma and flavor have caught on only recently. This kit is a bit lower in gravity and lighter in body than our other IPA recipes, which enhances the perceived bitterness and reduces the aging requirements. It shows up in the glass with a reddish-gold color and a thick, resinous Chinook aroma that lingers after the glass is emptied."

In order to have the freshest possible ingredients for this special seasonal brew, I gathered and milled the grains at the shop as I picked up the fresh hop order. I also had a left over half-pound of flaked rye from my HOTD Blue Dot clone, so I thought, might as well add that to the mix to balance out some extra IBUs I plan to introduce.

The general guideline for fresh hops is to use 5X the amount called for from a dried hop recipe. Remembering Black Raven's fresh hop IPA from last year, the beer should end up with a more subtle hop character than if dried hops had been used.

60 minute bittering hop addition.

I also snipped off my dozen or so home grown Cascade hop cones and threw them in as a first wort addition. Not much of a bitterness addition, but they are ready to harvest.

Total weight of my Cascade Hop crop: .5 oz.

The fresh hop cones held together really well through the boil. Racking to the fermenter was a much faster and easier task than with dried hops. The cones also seemed to absorb less water than I expected. After a 60 minute boil that started with 6 gallons, I was only about a quart off from a 5 gallon final wort.

Rainbow sheen of fresh hop lupulin oils at cold break.

My altered recipe for Chinook IPA:

10 lbs Organic 2 - row Briess Malt 1.8L

.75 lb Carapils malt 1.3L

.25 lb Crystal 120 deg L Briess Malt

.50 lb Flaked organic rye

Mash: 16.5 quarts water @ 152 ºF for 60 minutes.

2 tsp's Burton Water Salts in mash water
2 tsp's Gypsum in mash water

Mashout: Heat to 170 ºF over 2 minutes, rest 10 minutes.

Sparge 6 gallons from 170 ºF Hot Liquor.

Hops

.50 oz Cascade First Wort Boil

3.75 oz  35.02 IBU's Chinook fresh hops 60 mins

2.50 oz  8.47 IBU's Chinook fresh hops 20 mins

2.50 oz  8.47 IBU's Chinook fresh hops 10 mins

2.50 oz  1.01 IBU's Chinook fresh hops 1 mins

5.00 oz  0.00 IBUs Chinook fresh hop tea

1.0 oz      0.00 IBUs Chinook whole dry hop 7 days during secondary

Fermentation Steps
Primary 14 days @ 66.0°F
Secondary 14 days @ 72.0°F
Bottle/Keg 14 days @ 74.0°F

Carbonation Taste Test: Wild Red Velvet

After one week in the bottle, WRV has good carbonation and a rich red color.

A reasonably lasting head at week one, but I believe I detect acetaldehyde in the nose. 

Opened a bottle of my Wild Red Velvet experiment after one week at room temperature to see how the carbonation is coming along. During cold crash, I had let the fermentor go to 28 ºF for a day, which formed ice crystals in the top half of the wort. (Now I know how to make an eisbock one day.) I worried the cold might have killed the yeast before carbonation, but it has held up fine.

Looking back over my texts to Sean describing tasting impressions:

• Rich red color. Still a bit hazy.
• Strange but enticing funky aroma. Couldn't quite place it at first. Eventually settled on the seeds from papaya. That rich, tropical, musky aroma. Likely acetaldehyde, which results from incomplete yeast activity. Should diminish with further conditioning. 
• Creamy mouthfeel. Very drinkable. Slightly tart caramel. LIke a candied Granny Smith apple.
• Well hidden alcohol.
• By week two, the papaya seed aroma is fading, and the beer is taking on a drier character. The oak is starting to come through. 
• Beginning to think about what WRV would taste like with a further inoculation of brettanomyces to bring in a more recognizable funk. 

The lactobacillus funk is similar to a mild French soft cheese in some respects. I enjoy it, but I also hope it changes as the beer conditions in the bottle. The closest approximation I have to compare it to is BFM Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien 2007. I really can't wait to see how this one conditions.

Sour Wort: Wild Red Velvet

I think a lot of fans of sour beers such as Lambics and Flanders Reds have been intrigued by Matt Lange's "Funk with Less Fuss" sour mash technique described in Zymurgy, 34:2. The process, in short, is to first create a "sour starter" bacterial culture from a pint of water, a tablespoon or two of raw honey, and a couple of tablespoons of crushed malt. You keep the culture at 100 ºF for three days, growing a Lactobacillus bacteria with the smell of sour green apples. You then use this bacterial culture to inoculate the boiled and cooled 100 ºF wort, and again let the wort sour at a constant 100 ºF over a twelve to twenty-four hours.

Pint jar containing malted grains, water, and raw honey, sitting inside my fermenting cabinet wrapped in a heating blanket.

In my research around the homebrew forums, I dug up a few items about a beer style from before Prohibition that was called Kentucky Common Sour Mash. The style is one of three styles created in the United States, along with Cream Ale and California Common, or Steam Beer. Though we might also need to add India Black Ale to the style books if modern brewing history is taken into account.

My friend, Sean, and I were both interested in making a Red Ale, so I somehow talked him into pitching in on the 7 Bridges Organic Red all-grain kit from, you guessed it, 7 Bridges Co-op. The kit seemed like a nice choice for a Red, but I then dug up a more interesting higher gravity example from the AHA website called Red Velvet, created by Donny Hummel. By the time I bought the grains and hops I would need to upgrade to Red Velvet, our expenses had nearly doubled from the amount we had spent on the kit to begin with.

I need a bigger mash kettle. And a second kettle for the boil. Any heat addition caused the mash to overflow my 8 gallon kettle. Photo: Sean Frego

Then, as brew day crept closer, I kept thinking about sour mashing. In his article, Lange included a recipe for a Sour Brown Ale that made me think, "A Brown is not all that different from a Red, and some of my favorite beers are Flanders Sour Reds." So three days ago I started the culture, and today we inoculated 6 1/2 gallons of wort with indigenous Lactobacillus. I can't wait to see how this comes out.

I've never smelled anything quite exactly like the bacterial culture from malt and honey. But now, after becoming familiar with it, I catch whiffs of it all around. Photo: Sean Frego

Half empty or half full jar of inoculant. At this point, the thought crossed my mind, "what if this ruins a perfectly good batch of Red Ale?" Photo: Sean Frego

I carefully pour the Lactobacillus culture into the 100 ºF wort. Photo: Sean Frego.

After a short boil and cool down of the wort, we carefully laid aluminum foil across the top of the kettle to help reduce the surface contact with oxygen, then pressed the lid down and set the pot into my insulated brewing cabinet. The compartment is thermostat controlled to a constant 100 ºF with a heating blanket from the winter months.

Keep the wort temperature as close as possible to 100 ºF for 12 to 24 hours.

Meanwhile, I boiled down and perhaps somewhat caramelized the 1 1/2 gallons second runnings till it was a thick and tasty syrup that fit into two pint jars with a few spoonfuls left over. I'll add this back to the boil kettle once the proper amount of sourness is achieved from the Lactobacillus.

24 hours later, I continued the boil with hop additions. During the boil, my son yelled 30 feet across the driveway to me, "Dad, it smells like blackberries. Are you making a fruit beer?."

I racked just over 6 gallons to a 6 1/2 gallon carboy, pitched the yeast, and begin fermenting at a cool 60 ºF. Original gravity came to 1.052, but after 24 hours I added a pound of boiled and cooled organic cane sugar to the fermenter to raise the OG a little.

Here's the recipe and directions I came up with for this first try at an India Sour Red Ale:

Wild Red Velvet

All Grain

A full bodied sour red ale, with a mix of West Coast hop bitterness and Kentucky sourness along with a touch of mellow American oak.

Ingredients for 6 gals:

14 lbs. Briess organic pale 2-row malt


3 lbs. Organic Flaked Rye

3 1/2 lbs. Briess organic Munich malt

1 lb. Briess organic40 °L crystal malt


1 lb. Briess organic caramel 60 ^oL malt


8 oz. Briess organic caramel 120 ^oL malt

10 oz Victory malt


4 oz. Briess organic chocolate malt

1 pound organic cane sugar made from 1 lb cane sugar and juice of one lemon


1 oz. Magnum hops, 14.4% A.A. (60 min)

1/2 oz. Organic American Summit hop pellets- bittering (25 IBU)
 (60 min)

1 oz. Summit whole hops, 16% A.A. (20 mi)

1 oz. Organic American Cascade hop pellets- flavor (8 IBU) (7 min)

½ oz. Organic New Zealand Hallertaur hop pellets- aroma (5 min)

½ oz. Amarillo Gold hops, 7.5% A.A. (0 min)

1 ½ oz. Centennial hops, 8.5% A.A. (0 min)

1 ½ oz. Amarillo Gold whole hops (dry hop 7 days)

1 ½ oz. Centennial whole hops (dry hop 7 days)

White Labs WLAB001 California Ale yeast

Irish Moss (15 min)


Servomyces capsule (15 min)

Armagnac soaked oak cubes (7 days)

OG: 1.052 before candi sugar syrup addition.
FG: 1.016

DIRECTIONS

Create Bacterial Culture: Three days before brew day, take two tablespoons of malt and add it to a pint of 100 degree F water and a couple tablespoons of honey in a canning jar. Solution should be low gravity, about 1,030 OG. Loosely fit the lid to the jar, and keep at 100 degrees F for three days. pH should end up between 3.8 and 4.3. Strain out the grain and use the liquid to inoculate the wort. The culture should have a pleasant, tart smell, not unlike green apples.

Mash grains at 152 °F (66 °C) for 75 minutes. Add 4 teaspoons of gypsum to charcoal filtered mash water and 1 teaspoon of Burton Salts.

Bring Wort to a boil, then cool to 100 ºF and pitch Bacterial Culture. Sour the wort for 12 to 24 hours at 100 ºF. Smell or taste the sour wort to decide when it is sour enough. Keep in mind that the beer will taste more sour once most of the sugar has been converted to alcohol by the yeast.

Once the wort is sour to your liking, boil for 90 minutes, following the hop additions schedule.

Oxygenate wort and pitch yeast at 60 °F (16 °C). Ferment at 66 °F (19 °C). Raise temperature to 68 °F (20 °C) as fermentation slows (after about 1 week). Dry hop finished beer at 68 °F (20 °C) for 7 days. Crash to 30 °F (-1 °C) for four days. Bottle and carbonate for one week at room temperature. Condition for two weeks at 54 ºF.

Lightening Strike Brewery converted Ikea cabinet with insulated fermentation pods.

Sour Red Velvet Ale with ice packed around to bring primary down to 60  ºF.

Version 2 India Black Ale Recipe

I took the judges' advice to heart from my entry results in the 7 Bridges/Bison Brewing Pro-Am competition, and with the secondary fermentation now dry-hopping and cold-crashing,  the recipe is below. The main things I have attempted to change in this version are:

1. More hop aroma and more hop bitterness.
2. Less astringency from the dark and chocolate malts.
3. Chewier, richer malt character.
4. HIgher % ABV.
5. Drier finish. 

Northern Lights Organic Cascadian IBA v 2.0 all-grain

Ingredients: All-Grain

11.5 lb. Gambrinus Organic Pilsner Malt

8.0 oz. Great Western Organic Munich Malt

1.0 lb. Briess Organic Black Malt (500 ºL) cold steep 12 hours - then add 8.0 oz sparged grains to mash

4.0 oz Weyermann Organic Carafa® 2 (dark chocolate) cold steep 12 hours - then add 2.0 oz sparged grains to mash

12.0 oz Great Western Organic Crystal 60 Malt (60 ºL)

4.0 oz. Organic rye flakes

4.0 oz. Organic oat flakes

12.0 oz. Candi sugar - home made from organic cane sugar

1 teaspoon citric acid to candy sugar mix (didn't have for this batch) substituted a splash of maple syrup

0.5 oz Summit Whole Hops bag in mash (60 min), then empty bag into first wort (90 min)13.98 AAU


0.5 oz Centennial bag in Mash (60 min), then first wort (90 min) 6.2 AAU

1.0 oz. American Bravo Organic Whole Hops (90 mins) 13.5 AAU First Wort

1.0 oz. American Centennial Organic Whole Hops (30 mins) 6.2 AAU

0.5 oz. American Summit Organic Pellet Hops (30 mins) 15.1 AAU

2.0 oz. New Zealand Cascade Pellet Hops (10 mins) 7.8 AAU

2.0 oz. American Summit Pellet Hops (5 mins) 15.1 AAU

2.0 oz. New Zealand Cascade Pellet Hops (dry hops) 

3.0 oz. American Summit Organic Pellet Hops (dry hops)

1 capsule Servomyces (15 mins)

½ tsp. Organic Irish Moss Flakes (15 mins)

5 tsp Gypsum to mash water

1 tsp Burton Salts to Mash Water

White Labs WLP 013 Organic (London Ale) yeast

0.75 cup organic corn sugar for priming

Step by Step all-grain Brewing Instructions:

Make a yeast starter from the White Labs London Ale liquid yeast three days prior to pitching. Cool in refrigerator to separate yeast cake. Pour off most of the liquid.

Cold steep (60º F – 68º F) 1.0 lb Briess Organic Black Malt (500 ºL) and 4.0 oz Weyermann Organic Carafa® 2 (dark chocolate) in ½ water 12 hours (over night). Sparge with 3 pints 170 ºF water.

Steep the crushed grain in 6.0 gallons of water at 153 ºF for 60 minutes. 

Add 1.0 oz. American Bravo Organic Whole Hops to mash in a hop bag.

At 30 minutes steep, add 1/2 of the cold steeped dark adjunct malts to main mash.

At 60 minutes, pour two 1/2 gallon pitchers of wort back over the mash till clear runnings. Sparge with 5.0 gallons of 170º water using rotating sparge arm for 20 minutes.

Place 7 gallons of wort in 8.0  gallon boil kettle including the ½ gallon of cold steeped dark wort and 12 oz of Candi Sugar. Boil for 90 minutes. While boiling, add the hops, Irish moss, and yeast nutrient as per the schedule. 

While boil is going on, reduce third runnings in large pot, bringing 2 gallons down to 1/2 gallon. Add reduction to main boil at last possible moment, when wort boil is complete. Use two smaller pots next time, or a hotter flame.

Cool wort to 68º as quickly as possible using wort chiller. 

Transfer to sanitized 6.5 gallon primary fermenter.  Top off with boiled & cooled water to 5.0 gallons if necessary.

Aerate the wort with oxygen for 50 seconds and pitch the starter yeast. Hold at 68 ºF for 7 days or until fermentation subsides. Use a blow off tube instead of an airlock to avoid a yeast explosion.

When the primary fermentation is complete, rack beer to 5 gallon carboy, avoiding any splashing to prevent aerating the beer. Add the dry hop pellets and keep at 68 ºF for 5 days. Cold crash to 32 ºF over 7 days to settle out hops. Add isinglass finings three days before bottling.

Boil 2 cups water, add 0.75 cups bottling sugar, cool to 68º. Add to bottom of bottling bucket and syphon in beer.

Bottle or keg cold. Note: at 32º, the syphon hose tends to clog with ice. But if you let the beer warm, the hops float to the top.

Allow the beer to carbonate for one week at room temperature, then condition for 2 weeks at 50 - 54 ºF and enjoy your Northern Lights IBA.

The finished volume is: 5.25 gallons

The original gravity is: 1.070

The alcohol is: 9.5%

The color is: 126 HCU (~41 SRM)

The bitterness is: 99 IBU

The final gravity is:  1.012

Brewed Sunday, 6/12/2011

Racked to Secondary 6/18/2011 & began dry hopping

Bottled ______

IBA Explosion!!!

Came up with some special steps in brewing my Northern LIghts Organic India Black Ale, version 2 . . . maybe too special. The original gravity came to 1.070 after a 90 minute boil, with 99 IBU by my calculations using The Beer Recipator. These high gravity results seemed great, until I got home from work this afternoon and discovered the airlock filled with foam and a steady stream of CO2 off-gassing through the top. A small wet spot on the ceiling of my insulated fermentation chamber should have given me a hint that there was pressure building, but I wasn't quite prepared for what was to come moments later.

Airlock atop 6 1/2 gallon carboy moments before  "the event".

I have not seen such a vigorous fermentation so far in my brewing career, so I foolishly thought it would be a good idea to get a clean airlock loaded up with vodka and just replace the one that was having difficulties. With my two children watching from behind me, I pried off the airlock. Bad idea, unless you wrap the whole works with a towel. I got a nasty blast of sour chocolate yeast foam full in the face, in my hair, across my glasses, over my hands, and in a blast radius covering the inside walls and top of the chamber.

The mess was pretty easy to mop up, but my wife says our mud room now smells like, "a dive bar where generations of old drunks have puked up beer and only been partially cleaned up after."

The new airlock filled with foam almost immediately and threatened to blow again. So I yanked it out and draped the opening with plastic wrap while I figured out how to build a blow-off tube and sanitized reservoir from available materials. I feel like I'm reenacting that scene with the mission control engineers from 'Apollo 13', "Houston, we have a problem!"

I cut the hole too big on my first try, but got a snug (and hopefully airtight) seal by slicing through an airlock and  threading through some spare reinforced hose from my sparging setup.

The fermenter's temperature had also reached 73 ºF, so I packed the chamber with ice packs and began to bring things back to a reasonable range.

My handy Erlenmeyer Flask with a Chlorine Bleach solution set up to collect run off from the blow-off tube.

John Palmer suggests you use at lest a 1" diameter blow-off tube to reduce the chance of a clog and further eruptions, but 1/2" is all I have on hand. It now sounds like there is something alive in my fermenting cabinet. A near constant, but thoroughly unpredictable rhythm of boisterous yeast-breathing bubbles.

Judging of My Northern Lights IBA

Back in late April I tried my first crack at creating my own recipe, Northern Lights India Black Ale, and entered it for judging. The bad news is I didn't win the tickets to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver. The good news is, I did pretty good for a first attempt.

The event was this year's organic brewing AHA sanctioned Pro-Am competition sponsored by 7 Bridges Cooperative and Bison Brewing. My final average score was 28, placing the beer into the high end of the Good (21 - 29) category. While there's lots of room for  improvement, 28 out of a possible 50 points is not a bad start. The judges comments have given me some valuable pointers to improving on the recipe. And I have ordered ingredients to try again this weekend on version 2. Only this time the beer will be all-grain instead of partial mash.

Here's the official score sheet key to the Good section:

Good (21 - 29) - A satisfactory beer that generally fits the style parameters. Scores near the upper end of this range may have only a few minor flaws or be slightly out of style and also may be lacking in balance or complexity. Scores near the lower end of this range tend to have more flaws and are likely to have stylistic inconsistencies as well.

Both judges noted sediment around the neck of the bottle, which might have resulted from shipping, but most of their comments match my own thoughts to improve the recipe.

1. The beer got perfect scores on appearance - it is a really black IPA with a good head and wonderful lacing.
2. My hopping did not produce enough aroma, and the bitterness wasn't strong enough to balance the dark grain in the recipe. I have learned from later batches, how to make hoppier beers by using very different approaches to the hop additions and brew times. 
3. I clumsily over-sparged the specialty grains, and also over-oxidized the wort in dumping it into the brew kettle. Until I get two new larger kettles for HLT and lauter tun, I am siphoning my transfers back to the mash tank/brew kettle to prevent oxygenation of the wort.

The next batch will be better (famous last words?), in at least three ways. But all in all, when I count in the fun I had designing and making the beer, and the bounty of having a full five gallons of a good black IPA to savor, I still give it pretty high marks. The recipe can take a few tweaks, and over time I'll become a more accomplished home brewer.

Cold Crash for Dry Hops

Before photo: 5 oz. each of whole organic Summit and Centennial hops after one week dry hopping.

So far, my batches of beer have been good, but the hop aromas have been disappointing. This brew will be different. My second original recipe, Bin Laden's Dead Double IPA, is loosely based on Alan Spirits' HOTD Blue Dot D-IPA. The cake at the top of the fermenter is all lose hop buds, and lots of them. I used a paper funnel to get the hops into the carboy, and about half way through the first 5 oz. of hops, I started to wonder how difficult all those floating buds were going make the transfer to a bottling bucket.

After sunset I hauled the dry hopped brew out to my emptied lagering freezer for cold crashing. I'll lower the temperature by 4 ºF each day for the next week until the probe reads 32 ºF. Some of the the homebrew forums advise this procedure as the best way to get those hops to settle to the bottom of the fermenter. Something tells me I'm going to get a little bit under a full five gallons on this batch.

The second thing I started wondering about as I filled the bottle with those buds, was how I would ever get them out again. A bent aluminum light stand leg might work to pry the buds out one or two at a time. Couldn't take more than a week.  But then I found the great advice online that a bottle washer attached to a garden hose should blast the hops right out of the carboy.

Big League Beer Prices

A "large" size glass of "premium beer", Manny's Pale Ale from Georgetown Brewing, costs $9.75 at the ball park. This is kind of funny, since a full growler at the brewery costs only $5.00.

Going All-Grain on a Blue Dot Clone

Here's a very low res video of my makeshift lautering setup, shot with my IPhone. The kettle has a nice false-bottom.

One expert (Papazian) says use 1 quart of water per lb. of grain, another (Palmer) says use  2 quarts per lb. I ended up splitting the difference at 1.5 quarts per lb. Which Palmer recommends as a good compromise further into his book. With just over 15 pounds of grain, my 7 1/2 gallon boil kettle barely held the full mash.

Our new gas stove proved to be an unpredictable tool for keeping an even mash temperature from top to bottom of the kettle. During the first half hour of the mash I applied a very low heat to keep inching the thermometer reading above 152 ºF. But I know the pure liquid at the bottom of the mash, underneath the two-inch high false bottom, was hotter. And I quickly discovered how long the heated stainless steel bottom would keep transferring heat after I turned off the burner. I had added a half gallon of 170 ºF water with heat from the stove, and suddenly the core temperature jumped to 160 ºF.  Quickly I moved the nearly full kettle to the sink, (fortunately we have a galley kitchen), and a half gallon of cold water and sprayed cold water over the bottom and sides of the kettle. This got the the center of the mash to approximately156 ºF with half an hour to go in the sixty minute mash.

My homemade rotating sparge arm worked amazingly well, but I think I'll make some modifications on the re-design. All stainless steel, smaller holes, less solder. Or just buy one that's pre-built.

I followed Jon Buhagiar's DIY brass design from his BoHack blog site. Note he has an incorrect size for the large diameter tube that has to fit over the o-rings and into the transfer tubing. My local hobby shop was out of the piece in brass, so I ended up using stainless steel for the outer piece. Construction of the arm itself involved trial and quite a few errors. The water outlet holes need to be as small as possible, and I found that the gravity flow pressure wasn't enough to properly turn with more than five holes on each side of the rig. My soldering was also a bit out of practice, so I ruined my first try by filling the arm with solder. By the second attempt, I decided to just reheat the whole thing and force most of the excess solder out of the tube with an old coat hanger wire. At the end, because brass has a fine coating of lead, I soaked the arm in a solution of two parts vinegar to one part hydrogen peroxide.

Even though the arm worked flawlessly on my first lauter, I think I'll try one more time and use stainless steel all the way through.

With 8 oz of whole bittering hops and another 4 oz of pellet aroma hops, transferring from the brew kettle to the primary fermenter took a long time and a lot of stirring to keep the drain screen clear.

In another first, I dispensed with cloth bags for boiling the hops. This is good for added bittering and hop aroma, but made the transfer after chilling the wort slow as molasses. Even with a stainless steel kettle tube screen, the whole hop cones and the massive trub from the sparge kept clogging up the exit valve.

The proteins and sugars began to settle out after I pitched the Scottish Ale Yeast starter.  OG came in slightly high, at 1.080. This is going to be one big Double IPA.

I gave the wort sixty seconds of pure oxygen to make it a more comfortable environment for the yeast. Sure enough, by Monday morning fermentation had begun. In the afternoon, the trub was churning and bubbles popped through the airlock in a steady rhythm. The heat blanket and temperature control are set, and the insulated fermenting cabinet is keeping the surrounding temperatures stable. In a few days the batch should be ready for transfer to secondary and dry-hopping.

Here's my interpretation of the HOTD Blue Dot clone recipe from Brew Your Own Magazine:

Blue Dot IPA clone (all- grain)

•  Weyermann Organic Pilsner Malt, 13 Lbs. 2 oz.
•  Organic Rye Flakes, 2 Lbs.
•  American Summit Whole Hops 4 oz. (75 mins) – replacing Warrior
•  American Chinook Whole Hops 4 oz. (40 mins) – replacing Magnum
•  Belgian Admiral Hop Pellets 4 oz. (10 mins) – replacing Columbus
•  American Summit Whole Hops 5 oz. (dry hop) – replacing Warrior
• American Centennial Whole Hops 5 oz. (dry hop) – replacing Amarillo
•  Yeast: Wyeast Scottish Ale, 125 ml XL
•  ¾ teespoon Organic Irish Moss (10 mins)
•  1 Servomyces capsule (10 mins)
•  Organic Corn Sugar (Dextrose), 0.75 cup for bottling

1. Start yeast at least 48 hours before brew day, then chill over night in refrigerator to settle the yeast, then bring to room temperature in a dark place. Dump off excess liquid before pitching.
2. Heat 24 qts. of filtered water to 165 ºF.
3. Add grains and steep for 60 minutes at 154 – 156 ºF.
4. Heat  5  gallons of water to 170 ^oF in a separate pot. Sparge the grains with this water when the mash is complete.
5. Add water to the liquid collected from the grains to make up to 7 gallons and boil for 180 minutes. (You need to perform a full wort boil to get the right bitterness and character from the hops.) Add hops as per ingredient list
6. Add Irish Moss flakes and Servomyces capsule with 10 minutes remaining.
7. Cool kettle to 68 ºF with wort chiller.
8. Transfer liquid to primary fermenter.
9. Aerate cooled wort with pure oxygen for sixty seconds.
10. Pitch yeast starter.
11. Ferment at 68 ºF. till activity slows.
12. Transfer to secondary fermenter, leaving behind most of the trub.
13. Add dry hops and ferment in secondary 7 to 14 days.
14. Transfer to bottling bucket, add carbonating sugar, bottle.

Grain bill and hops:

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Qty	Item	Total
1	Wyeast Scottish Ale, 125 ml XL	$7.00
14	Weyermann Organic Pilsner Malt, 1 Lb.	$29.96
2	Organic Rye Flakes, per Lb.	$4.42
1	Organic Corn Sugar (Dextrose), 1 Lb.	$4.17
2	Belgian Admiral Hop Pellets 2 oz.	$8.34
1	American Centennial Whole Hops 1 oz. package (2010)	$2.38
1	American Centennial Whole Hops 4 oz. (2010)	$6.38
1	American Summit Whole Hops 1 oz. (2009)	$1.90
2	American Summit Whole Hops 4 oz. (2009)	$10.20
1	American Chinook Whole Hops 4 oz. (2010)	$6.36

Subtotal                                                                                                            $81.13