I organized all the equipment and got the initial mash water warming to temp. At temp, I added to the mash tun and stirred in the grain. All going well. While warming the sparge water I ran out of propane and had to go ask my neighbor to borrow their tank. Lesson number one.... make sure you have enough propane for the brew!
I decided I wanted to do a little larger brew, so I planned to do 7 gallons. I ran the numbers in ProMash to determine how much water was needed for the mash. After the mash and sparge were complete, I had a full boil kettle, PLUS another 2.5 gallons of wort. Lesson number two.... get the new brew keggles completed so you have plenty of room to boil!
OK, so I decided to do a 90 minute boil, to boil down some of the volume before adding hops. That was going great until it boiled over on me, putting out the flame of my burner and subsequently gumming it up. I then had to remove the burner from the stand and clean it before I could proceed. Lesson number three.... avoid boil overs at all costs!
So, I got that cleaned up and got the kettle back on the burner and up to a boil. At the same time, I had the 'extra' wort boiling in smaller pots on the stove in the house. Gotta boil it for at least 60 minutes to get rid of DMS...I think it's DMS. It's for something! One of the pots boiled over on the stove making a mess! Lesson number four.... avoid brewing on the stove. Refer to lesson number two, gotta get the keggles done!
The rest of the boil went fine and I felt the trials were over. Wrong! When turning the water on for the wort chiller, I noticed that the line into the copper coil was leaking, and into the brew! A quick grab of the screw driver (still on the porch from the burner cleaning) to tighten the hose clamp fixed the problem. Lesson number five.... test the wort chiller during the brew to ensure it isn't going to leak!
OK, so the rest of the night went fine. After chilling, I whirlpooled to get the hop matter to the bottom of the kettle, then racked to the fermenter. I missed my target gravity by .02, so all in all not bad. Although, my target was only 70% efficiency. I think I'm going to see if adjusting the grain crush will help that.
The IPA is now happily fermenting. I used glass for my primary fermenter for the first time, and it has been very interesting to watch the fermentation. I never realized how much churning the wort did during fermentation, pretty freaking cool! It will ferment for another few days and then I will rack to the secondary and add dry hops.
Below are pictures from the brew:
Chek out the Arnie's Bar cup I used instead of the arilock. That will be replaced with an airlock after the initial fermentation slows.
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