Well, as previously posted, this brew was not all that enjoyable. I had several problems in getting it completed, and I hope that in the end it is worth all the effort.
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.
hat recent update on the hops progress. All the plants are doing very well, but at different stages due to variety and how aggressive I was when trimming early in the season. The picture to the right is of the entire hop garden, strung on the new hop trellis, and as of yet I haven't received any complaints from the neighbors!
healthy, but as my first year golding last season, I don't expect to get any cones off of these plants this year. I plan on experimenting with trimming them, keeping a few to only 2 strong bines, and letting the others go with up to 6. Then next season, I can see if there is any noticeable difference in the strength and viability of the second year plants.
plants was crazy, with each of the hop mounds looking like thick bushes. Each plant shot bines out everywhere which caused me to be more aggressive with trimming them back in April. Therefore, they (right) are a little behind the cascades but doing very well. With any luck, one of them will have bines topping the new trellis before my next post!
The cascades are rocking along. As you can see from the picture on the left, one of them has already expanded several bines along the top trellis string. 
Those bines are now over 15 ft in length! The other second year cascade is close behind and the new cascade while small, looks strong and should produce well next year. Oh, the 2 second year cascades are already putting on cones (right)!
I was able to get some 8ft lengths of 1 ¼ inch boiler steam pipe from my dad along with a length of pipe that fit just over the the outside of the 1 ¼ pipe. That allowed me to take two 8ft lengths of pipe and weld them t
ogether to total 16ft tall, using the over sized pipe to provide strength. The picture on the left, shows the section of one of the pipes after being welded together. Each of these pipes was sunk into the ground 2 ½ ft, making the new trellis 13 ½ ft tall. The picture on the right shows one of the new pipes next to the old trellis showing how much taller it is.
I made caps to go on top of each of the 4 pipes I used for the trellis. I cut short lengths of the over sized pipe, welded plate over the top of one end and then drilled and installed large eye
hooks. The caps had 2 purposes, provide a place to string trellis line and to keep water out of the pipes. Needless to say, it was a bit unnerving stringing all of the lines. Since the caps were 13 ½ ft off the ground, I had to stand on the top rungs of an a frame ladder to barely reach.
As you can see from the picture of the cascades (left), the 8 foot trellis from last year was not going to cut it! Only 2/3 the way through May and multiple bines already wandering the top and twisting themselves together. New trellis....next post!
The new Goldings plants (right) are doing very well. I'm not sure that there will be any cones to harvest from them this year, but they are growing and will come back strong next year. For experimenting with creating new rhizomes from first year plants, I'm very happy with the results!
I was very interested to see how it would do no longer attached to the main plant for sustenance. As you can see from the pictures, it has done very well and looks as though it will fulfill its purpose, to replace the cascade plant I lost last year due to storms.
10 shoots showing, with one of them about 3 feet tall! Now the decision is whether or not to separate the rhizome into a few different rhizomes before planting in the hop garden. If all goes well, I'll have to make that decision this coming weekend and get this thing planted.
picture on the left is a bine that I buried early in the season, and was one I had growing up my main trellis. The picture on the right, is a bine I let grow to about 2 feet later in the growing season and buried it. I sus
pect they are both going to produce plants, but the diameter of the rhizome planted earlier in the season is about twice as large, and as you can see already has a more established root structure.
This plant at the end of last season had one main bine with several offshoots as you can see. The main bine heading down into the ground is right at the center of the picture, so everything you see is the resulting rhizome!
To start, I stripped all of the plants of foliage from the top, leaving the lower bines connected to the crown. The picture on the left is one of the centennial plants stripped. For the bines left connected to the crown,
I created a coil around the main stem coming out of the ground (right). That coil was then covered with fresh dirt (lower left). I'm hoping that this will allow these bines to continue to be supported by the crown, but start to grow some rootlets.
The picture lower right is of the centennial bines I buried in a trench at the back of my hop garden. I just took some long bine sections from the lower part of the plant, dug a tre
nch a few inches deep and then placed the bines in there. In the spring, I'll dig up the trench and see if the bines are still alive or whether they have died. Either way, I will not have lost anything!
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