An Oven Lauter Tun

Near freezing temperatures last Sunday made maintaining a constant 150º steeping temperature on my "Mother's Day" Organic Farmhouse Belgian Blonde Ale tricky in the garage. I tried wrapping the brew kettle in a blanket. Still, I needed to place it back on the burner from time to time to keep the temperature from plunging. This resulted in a bit of scalding on the bottom of the pot, nothing too serious. In the end, the mash-extract kit from Seven Bridges Cooperative made a beautiful golden wort that I've moved to a secondary fermenter after a successful primary. Twelve weeks in the bottle, and batch #3 will be ready.

Tip of the week: Use your kitchen's oven as a pretty decent lautering temperature control.

This week, I again used my new, larger grain steeping bag for batch #4, an organic Extra Special Bitter mash-extract kit. With a drenching January rain and high winds, I decided to move the first part of the brewing process, the steeping of specialty grains, indoors.

On the stove heat 1.75 gallons of carbon filtered water to 160º in a large enamel canning kettle for the grains. At the same time, preheat the gas oven to 200º to bring oven's pizza stone up to temperature. Pour the specialty grain ingredients into the bag and begin to steep. Bring the oven down to 170º, and place the kettle inside on the stone.


While the steep commences, begin warming two additional kettles of water to 170º, one for sparging, and one to bring the eight gallon boil kettle up to 6.5 gallons of liquid. (My evaporation rate is kind of high, so I have to add an extra 1.5 gallons at the start of the boil.) The steeping kettle in the oven can an almost constant 150º for an hour. You might even need to watch that the temperature doesn't begin to rise toward 160º. If it does, just turn the oven off and pull the kettle out for a few minutes to cool.

My wife still complained about helping to pour hot water over the steeped grains as I held the bag and "gently coached" her on how to properly spread the sparge water around without scalding me. But she didn't complain as much as the last two times when I asked her to perch on a step ladder over the boil kettle outside doing the same job.

Eventually, my brother-in-law stopped by to see the main boil take place, and to help me drink a growler of my batch #1 "Squito" light ale. The ESB kit's step by step brewing instructions suggested adding a pound or two of light honey with the six pounds of liquid malt extract to give the brew a dry finish. The day before, I had bought a pint of River Farm honey from Thorp, WA. Perfect for this batch, but it really boosted the Original Gravity initially.

Homebrew Library Tip: Palmer's "How To Brew" book suggests you should leave the lid off the kettle for the whole boil in order to release sulfur compounds that can give the beer cabbage-like aromas. So, even with frequent strong wind gusts buffeting the burner, that's what we did.

The winds died down by the end of the boil. And during the cold break, the sun appeared and brought temperatures into the middle 50s. I decided to name this batch of organic ESB, "la Nina", in honor of this winter's weather.